Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  “With all due respect,” said Mr. Barbour, “you might be the reason Audrey needs a chaperone. We’d appreciate some letters of reference before she travels.”

  I didn’t sass Mr. Barbour that time.

  Three letters came, all on the same day. The thickest wore a return address of 253 West 125th Street, Harlem. Twenty-five fives, so I opened it first. “Joseph Glaser is a prince among men,” it read, in typeface whose serifs supported its honor. The words The Apollo Theater looped across the top of the creamy paper, and six inches below them, a Mr. Jack Schiffman, Owner, had signed. The second letter came from a Miss L. Jones on 116th Street. A dancer, she wrote, her career managed by Mr. Glaser, and in beautiful, accomplished handwriting, she hoped to meet me when I arrived in Harlem. She’d chosen my favorite shade of lavender for her stationery. “Joe Glaser wouldn’t so much as hurt a fly,” she wrote, though Grandpap pointed out that we already knew that not to be true. She’d signed her name bigger than she’d written the word “sincerely.” The L in Letty wore a small, practiced bead to the left of its head.

  The third letter was the only one that stopped Grandpap from fidgeting, as it was folded around three ten-dollar bills for my travels. “I regret that I cannot accompany Audrey on her journey,” Mr. Glaser wrote, “but I will meet her at Penn Station.” The L&N came through Mt. Sterling four days a week, and we knew every single body who descended its steps. It never occurred to us that the scene at Penn Station would be any different.

  HARLEM

  I’d pulled apart and eaten all of Mother’s fried chicken while waiting to switch to the integrated train car in Cincinnati, and as the chain of twelve cars clacked down the middle of the long, lonely rectangle of Pennsylvania, I’d strained my eyes to make what I could out of darkness, felt up through the grease-depleted bottom of my paper bag, and found the red flour tin with Mother’s biscuits. Under the glass domes of Penn Station’s skylit ceiling I was hungry, dirty between my legs from two days of squatting over toilets and sour in the mouth from drinking PET Milk. Fifty cents of my thirty dollars had gone to advise Mr. Glaser of my arrival via telegram, and yet even after I’d been sitting on the schooner-length bench for three hours, watching the giant face of Penn Station’s all-seeing clock until I could close my eyes and still find its long and short arm burned onto my retina, I didn’t see Mr. Glaser. On either side of me, a steady procession of men sat down, bit into sandwiches, checked their watches, and hurried back to offices; women sauntered through the station with glossy department store bags draped over their arms; a fourth and then a fifth hour passed, and still I hadn’t seen him. At the ticket booth, I asked a clerk whether he’d seen a tall, dark-haired White man with fine Italian shoes. “Seen about a thousand of ’em today,” he told me. “And gal, I dunno where you’re from, but around here, you’d better keep an eye on your suitcase.”

  Late afternoon lay itself atop the station’s glass domes and glanced off the black steel beams; the sun disappeared from the highest ceiling glass and streaked through ventilation shafts along the wall. A poor, trapped bird flew the length of the station to light on a beam, and I wondered whether fourteen dollars and forty-three cents would buy me a week’s worth of lodging, and what kind of employment I’d have to secure when that money was gone. A plump grandmother in the station’s balcony turned the violet grosgrain ribbon around her hat as she looked over the railing, and I wondered how many streetlamps and how much danger lay between me and the genteel parlor of Miss L. Jones of 116th Street. I imagined Caroline telling me what a damn fool I was, and wondered how, if she were there, she would go about finding the address. In the exact middle of the station, a young girl about my age paused just long enough to spit her gum on the floor, then stood there, swaying at the waist, looking this way and that at the giant clock, oblivious to the disapproving glances of the few people who’d witnessed her transgression; I wondered how long New York would take to make me so bold. I never once wondered whether I should catch a train back to Kentucky.

  Over the next hour the hall grew crowded with commuters in various stages of catching their trips. Some stood and waited, holding their purses and briefcases and suit jackets, watching the schedule board turn its letters, rearrange hours, subtract suburbs. Others were runners, dodging these waiters so that they might board nearly departing trains. In the middle of all these people, a hunched, balding man swept the glass brick floor. He was as old as Grandpap, with the same bushy eyebrows, but he moved with an effort of spryness I’d never noticed in any of the old men at home. He had more fight about him. In New York, he had to. The girl’s gum had dried and hardened, and the old janitor squatted to scrape it from the glass with his dustpan. Scraping and chipping, he squinted, and I could tell that the trick of afternoon light made it impossible for him to work easily. Mother had always been fond of saying that nothing good happened after dark, and at that time—just fallen off the train, watching the women’s tight silk blouses stretch over their chests, listening to the men at the shoeshine stand whistle at them, watching them offer up rouged smiles in return—I imagined that Mother’s warning applied especially to New York City. A red marble plaque over the big arched door at the end of the hall read WEST, so I set out of the train station toward the setting sun, my coat in the crook of my elbow and my suitcase heavy in the opposite hand.

  For a young woman alone, the suitcase was poorly sized, and its bulk forced me to amble out of the building as a three-legged stool: halfway across the street, the weight became more than I’d realized. While a red light held cars at the intersection I set it down in the middle of the street, right atop a line of tar that bled through a crack in the asphalt, and breathed. In, out, and the city’s steam filled my lungs to let me know I was staying here. In, out, and the buzz of five million people filled my ears so I’d have faith. I felt watched, though the sheer number of hurrying people told me otherwise: I felt watched by someone who was not there. Not my father, who knew already that I was here, living what he hadn’t dared. Not my mother nor Grandpap, though I should have been thinking of them, wondering how they’d know I was safe; what they would think of this mammoth city if they ever got to see it. I wasn’t thinking of any of them, I realized—I was thinking of Caroline, wondering how she’d rejected someone who could find their way to something as magnificent as this. The light changed and I picked up my suitcase to run, and I thought this—I thought that I must push her from my mind once and for all. I would make new friends and a new life, and memories of her simply wouldn’t be profitable. Tar had stuck on the suitcase’s bottom, and then it stuck to my nylons, and though I was hurrying, a couple of drivers honked as I made the far lane, and I knew that this was something I’d always remember—my clumsy entrance into Manhattan. I stepped up to the sidewalk and found, in the corner trash can, a perfectly uneaten birthday cake, and an uncapped lipstick that someone had tired of. To my left, beyond the tall buildings overhanging the street, the avenue dropped off into the Hudson.

  I walked on, and my right arm blanched and then reddened, and began to hate me for all the useless dresses packed, the extra can of Bergamot hair grease stuffed in a corner, the photograph of Daddy fastened into my belongings. Mother had given me the black dress she’d worn to Daddy’s funeral, and told me if I never came back home, to at least mail the dress. Now, having it seemed ridiculous; it didn’t even fit me without the belt. At the corner of Eighth Avenue, a man in a decades-old smoking jacket put out a hand to help, but I remembered the words of the station clerk and held tight to the handle as the man crushed my fingers with his own. His palm was dry and cracked, and I wrested the handle from him and stepped off the curb to try and escape, but a school of passing cars held me back. The man waved me off and walked on into the Manhattan sunset, a river charred to orange that seeped through only in inches behind high skyscrapers whose faces were already dark. Past both sides of me, people streamed across the intersection, people more serious in their being than I’d ever seen—a woman in a red jack
et rubbed the pocked skin of her cheek, a small girl in a felt hat with a yellow ribbon stamped her foot and cried out to her mother for a nickel, and an old man with a Dachshund puppy barked a cough full of juice. To put less distance between my life and theirs, I stepped off the curb and followed. Two blocks took me from the white street sign at 34th to the yellowed one at 32nd; I reversed myself and headed north. The September cool upset my stomach and hurt my teeth. A towheaded man with one ear gone missing blew me a kiss.

  “Miss,” said a man flanking my right. “Miss, are you lost?”

  “Of course not. Not lost, because I do know where I am going. North. To 116th.”

  “Planning on walking it?” He smiled, and took in my impractical shoes, the heels of them still muddy from my walk down Queen Street to the Mt. Sterling train depot. He had a silver wedding band, and a pistol in a holster on his belt, but his ears rose when he smiled and they made me feel that I should be honest. His black wool coat smelled of new rain.

  “It’s only eighty-four streets,” I told him.

  “Good at math. Bad at accepting help,” he said. He took my suitcase and carried it above his head like it was full of air. He was tall, taller than Junebug, and even finer, with copper skin and broad shoulders. He spoke without singsong, like the White people on WLEX, though when he hit the word “help,” something, maybe a Georgian auntie or a South Carolinian grandpa, oozed through the bricks enclosing his accent.

  “So you’re walking to Harlem,” he said, laying so hard on the “a” that the “r” flew off the balance. “Got a place you’re staying up there?”

  “I believe so.”

  A look crossed his face. As he slid his eyes my way, I noticed a thin line in his eyebrow where hair didn’t grow. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Nineteeen,” I lied, straightening my spine.

  “And your people sent you up North alone?”

  I wasn’t alone. I had letters of reference, addresses. Fourteen dollars and forty-three cents. But his ears rose once more, and this time they told me I should lie. “I’m staying with my cousin,” I told him. “She’s a dressmaker.”

  “She should have met you at the train station, I would think,” he said. In my heels, I couldn’t match even half his stride, and I was almost out of breath from the pace he was keeping. “Where on 116th?” he asked.

  “763 East.”

  “This way, then,” he said, and we took a right on 42nd, which spread three times as wide as any of the city streets I’d seen up until then, with neon signs casting a daylight glow against the sunset. Where the streets bordering Penn Station had shown me a manageable slice of Manhattan, 42nd Street showed me how it was a place I’d never master. Under the electric light I was able to watch faces, but even in sharp relief all the eyes and mouths came up blank: emotion was a thing much foreshortened in the city. Even the man walking with me had suddenly donned a blank mask: he nodded at a sausage seller on the corner, but didn’t smile. People—mostly other Negroes—did occasionally glance at us, taking in the man’s sharp suit and close shave against my jacket with its torn hem and my hair that had lost its curl in Ohio. We passed a tailor’s, a butcher’s, a deli, a peep show. “Times Square, Young Sister,” the man told me, and we both read the frightened little sandwich billboard standing outside the Flesh Merchant: GIRLS BOUGHT, SOLD, AND TRADED.

  Two heavily lipsticked women in four-inch-high heels patrolled the corner of Broadway, jacketless, managing the New York night without armor. No wool coats to warm their bare shoulders, no sensible shoes to help them run. The shorter one circled her arms around a lamppost as though she were steering a mast, out on a dare, maneuvering waves. We passed a newsstand, a pizzeria, an old woman sweeping a fire hydrant. A florist’s. A shoe repair. A tea seller. Finally, the man stopped in front of a green pole with a globe of light atop a stair rail. Horribly, inconceivably, a stairway dropped through a hole in the sidewalk. As long as I’d lived in Kentucky, I’d never seen the opening to a mine—Grandpap had made sure of it—but now here it was, the mouth of a shaft. A metal sign stood up from the hole, with two winged green angels flanking the letters Interborough Rapid Transit Company.

  “Here’s the Nine train. Board the northbound and get off at 116th. Even there, I’m afraid you’ll be walking east for some time.”

  “Only six streets.”

  “Six blocks. And they’re avenues. You’ll soon learn that the avenues are longer than the streets, and that makes all the difference in the world. Oh and”—he said, finding a five in his pocket—“take this.”

  “Mister, I can’t.”

  He pushed the bill into my palm. “In a town like this,” he said, “there’s no room for pride. This city will eat you alive, and you’re not going to be able to stop it. Just take help where you can find it, and be gracious. Get off that subway train and get yourself and that suitcase into a taxi.”

  I thanked him and bumped my suitcase down the steps to the subway, where I stood in line and paid fifteen cents for a token to feed the chrome turnstile. The subway was such a spread of filth—spots of old gum speckling the floor, rats crisscrossing the tracks, a woman unwittingly dragging a wad of used tissue with the stiletto heel of her shoe—that I had to close my eyes. I counted to sixteen and then back down again, and I’d done this three times when the platform started to rattle under my shoes. A head of wind grew, and a light opened itself into the tunnel, and I quickly counted 32 more to make it an even 128. I stepped closer to the edge of the platform so I could board, but the train never stopped—it just screeched quickly by all of us, blowing my hair, leaving a galaxy of dust in the air. I couldn’t know why, but no one else had even expected it to stop: the man next to me had never even looked over the top of his newspaper. The train screeched past all of us, but I was the only one looking after it.

  This city was so big, so full of missed possibilities and unmet connections. No easily walked trip to the Colored store, no knowing where anyone stood with anyone else. No Mother; no Caroline. Five million people, every single one of them taking their fifteen breaths per minute, walking their twenty thousand steps per day on streets that number into the two hundreds. Sweating, crying, defecating, suckling—more individual acts of love and hatred and just plain getting by than I could ever count, none of them cohering, perhaps not even between people who lived on the same city block. Another train whirred into place against the platform, spreading my jacket with its backdraft. The conductor leaned his head out of a window and ten sets of squealing doors opened to the people who rushed all around me to get on, and I got sad, thinking that in Kentucky, someone, possibly a White man even, would have stopped to help. Of course, in New York, it would be neither a matter of ill breeding nor disrespect, I could already see: it was simply that here, in this city where ten million meetings were convened in any given morning and an infinity of meals served and eaten, there would be no time for simple kindness. I was so slow with my suitcase that the doors closed on it as I was pushing it on the train. I screamed.

  “Suitcase!” someone on my car yelled. The doors miraculously opened and I pulled the other half onto the car. The doors closed again, a woman with a small child in her lap sighed her frustration at the delay, and as the train started moving and threw me off balance and into the railing, I wondered whether Mr. Glaser was eating more spotted puffer at that very moment, or watching Miss L. Jones stretch her long legs along a barre in a dance studio. The eighty-five streets between me and 116th stretched out as a universe of rooms and lives and desires and bodies, and the train shot forward on this screaming tide. Across from me, a man slept with his mouth hanging open, and I turned my head, thinking it too intimate a thing to witness.

  When the conductor shouted 116th! I stood up and tried to yank the edge of my coat from beneath the woman who’d sat on it when she got on at 96th. In her confusion, or perhaps in her assumption that I was trying to pick her pocket, she yanked my coat back, and by the time she understood enough to release it, t
he doors had closed once more, and I grabbed the overhead rail and waited until the conductor called 125th! Five fives, I remembered, and despite the precision of it, I knew I was unwilling to be lost there. I jumped out my seat, then, and out the train’s sliding doors to follow the crowd—down the platform, up the stone steps, and into the growing crispness of evening, the relative quiet of Harlem. Where Midtown Manhattan had been an unending buzz, Harlem was an arrangement of well-defined noise—people hawking castor oil, children squealing at tossed balls, radios blasting from storefronts. I saw my own people in all shades, from sepia to passing; my people selling Fire!; my people handing out leaflets for Pentecostal churches; my people looking aged and youthful and sad and flirtatious and harried and fevered and loved. I found a woman with large, childlike eyes beneath a red pillbox hat. “Might you point me in the direction of the Apollo Theater?” I asked her.

  “Aww, go on back to Detroit, bitch.”

  I walked a few steps and asked a boy who sat haughtily, with perfect posture and a smile full of judgment, on the back of an empty mail cart. “Two blocks, that direction there,” he said, pointing with a middle finger beringed at both joints.

  Two streets, then. My suitcase felt lighter. It could have carried me. The sugarsick smell of roasting cashews cleared my worries about finding a room or a bed; this street held enough energy to make me doubt that I’d ever need sleep again. By the time I finally came upon the neon sign, with red letters falling vertically from the “A” four stories off the street, I’d seen more of the earth’s peoples than I’d seen in my entire sixteen years previous. Mr. Barnett had taken down his dusty atlas and shown me a map of Manhattan before I left, but now, I couldn’t believe I was standing less than five miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Manhattan couldn’t have been an island; it was a world.