by Edmund White
At last a driver would pause before a young man who’d hop down and lean into the open window, listen – and then the young man would either shake his head or spit or, if a deal had been struck, swagger around to the other side and get in. Look at them: the curving windshield whispers down the reflection of a blinking neon sign on two faces, a bald man behind the wheel whose glasses are crazed by streaks of green light from the dashboard below, whose ears are fleshy, whose small mouth is pinched smaller by anxiety or anticipation. Beside him the young man, head thrown back on the seat so that we can see only the strong white parabola of his jaw and the working Adam’s apple. He’s slumped far down and he’s already thinking his way into his job. Or maybe he’s embarrassed by so much downtown between fantasy and act. They drive off, only the high notes from the car radio reaching me.
That night, however, I had no comfortable assumptions about who these men were and what they were willing to do. I crossed the street to the island, ascended the two steps on to the stone platform – and sat down on a bench. There were policemen nearby. I had a white shirt on, a tie at half-mast, seersucker pants from a suit, polished lace-up shoes, clean nails and short hair, money in my wallet. I was a polite, well-spoken teen, not a vagrant or a criminal – the law would favor me. My father was nearby, working in his office; I was hanging around, waiting for him. Years of traveling alone on trains across the country to see my father had made me fearless before strangers and had led me to assume the unknown is safe, at least reasonably safe if encountered in public places. I set great store by my tie and raised the knot to cover the still-unbuttoned collar opening. No one could tell me to leave this bench.
It was hot and dark. The circling cars were unnerving – so many unseen viewers looking at me. Although this was the town where I’d been born and spent every summer, I’d never explored it on my own. The library, the bookstore, Symphony Hall, the office, the dry cleaner’s, the state liquor commission, the ball park, my school, the department stores, that glass ball of a restaurant perched high up there – these I’d been to hundreds of times with my father and stepmother, but I’d always been escorted by them, like a prisoner, through the shadowy, dangerous city.
And yet I’d known all along it was something mysterious and anguished beyond my experience, if not my comprehension. We had a maid, Blanche, who inserted bits of straw into her pierced ears to keep the holes from growing shut, sneezed her snuff in a fine spray of brown dots over the sheets when she was ironing and slouched around the kitchen in her worn-down, backless slippers, once purple but now the color and sheen of a bare oak branch in the rain. She was always uncorseted under her blue cotton uniform; I pictured her rolling, black and fragrant, under that fabric and wondered what her mammoth breasts looked like.
Although she had a daughter five years older than I (illegitimate, or so my stepmother whispered significantly), Blanche sounded like a young girl as she hummed to a Negro station. When she moved from one room to the next, she unplugged the little Bakelite radio with the cream-colored grille over the brown speaker cloth and took it with her. That music excited me, but I thought I shouldn’t listen to it too closely. It was “Negro music” and therefore forbidden – part of another culture more violent and vibrant than mine but somehow inferior yet no less exclusive.
Charles, the handyman, would emerge from the basement sweaty and pungent and, standing three steps below me, lecture me about the Bible, the Second Coming and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes. Whenever I said something, he’d laugh in a steady, stylized way to shut me up and then start burrowing back into his obsessions. He seemed to know everything, chapter and verse – Egyptians, Abyssinians, the Lost Tribe, Russian plots, Fair Deal and New Deal – but when I’d repeat one of his remarks at dinner, my father would laugh (this, too, was a stylized laugh) and say, “You’ve been listening to Charles again. That nigger just talks nonsense. Now don’t you bother him, let him get on with his work.” I never doubted that my father was right, but I kept wondering how Dad could tell it was nonsense. What mysterious ignorance leaked out of Charles’s words to poison them and render them worthless, inedible? For Charles, like me, haunted the library; I watched his shelf of books in the basement rotate. And Charles was a high deacon of his church, the wizard of his tribe; when he died his splendid robes overflowed his casket. That his nonsense made perfect sense to me alarmed me – was I, like Charles, eating the tripe of knowledge while Dad sat down to the steak?
I suppose I never wondered where Blanche or Charles went at night; when it was convenient to do so, I still thought of the world as a well-arranged place where people did work that suited them and lived in houses appropriate to their tastes and needs. But once Blanche called us in the middle of an August night and my father, stepmother and I rushed to her aid. In the big Cadillac we breasted our way into unknown streets through the crowds of naked children playing in the tumult of water liberated from a fireplug (“Stop that!” I shouted silently at them, outraged and frightened. “That’s illegal!”). Past the stoops crowded with grown-ups playing cards and drinking wine. In one glaring doorway a woman stood, holding her diapered baby against her, a look of stoic indignation on her young face, a face one could imagine squeezing out tears without ever changing expression or softening the wide, fierce eyes, set jaw, everted lower lip. The smell of something delicious – charred meat, maybe, and maybe burning honey – filled the air. “Roll up your windows, for Chrissake, and lock the doors,” my father shouted at us. “Dammit, use your heads – don’t you know this place is dangerous as hell!”
A bright miner’s lamp, glass globe containing a white fire devoid of blues and yellows, dangled from the roof of a vendor’s cart; he was selling food of some sort to children. Even through the closed windows I could hear the babble of festive, delirious radios. A seven-foot skinny man in spats, shades, an electric-green shantung suit and a flat-brimmed white beaver hat with a matching green band strolled in front of our car and patted our fender with elaborate mockery. “I’ll kill the bastard,” Dad shouted. “I swear I’ll kill that goddamn ape if he scratches my fender.”
“Oh-h-h . . .” my stepmother sang on a high note I’d never heard before. “You’ll get us all killed. Honey, my heart.” The man, who my father told us was a “pimp” (whatever that might be), bowed to unheard applause, pulled his hat down over one eye like a Parisian and ambled on, letting us pass.
We hurried up five flights of dirty, broken stairs, littered with empty pint bottles, bags of garbage and two dolls (both white, I noticed, and blond and mutilated), past landings and open doors, which gave me glimpses of men playing cards and, across the hall, a grandmother alone and asleep in an armchair with antimacassars. Her radio was playing that Negro music. Her brown cotton stockings had been rolled down below her black knees.
Blanche we found wailing and shouting, “My baby, my baby!” as she hopped and danced in circles of pain around her daughter, whose hand, half lopped off, was spouting blood. My father gathered the girl up in his arms and we all rushed off to the emergency room of a hospital.
She lived. Her hand was even sewn back on, though the incident (jealous lover with an ax) had broken her mind. Afterward the girl didn’t go back to her job and feared even leaving the building. My stepmother thought the loss of blood had somehow left her feeble-minded.
In the hospital parking lot my father fussed over the blood on his suit and on the Cadillac upholstery, though I wondered if his pettiness wasn’t merely a way of silencing Blanche, who kept kissing his whole hand in gratitude. Or perhaps he’d found a way of reintroducing the ordinary into a night that had dipped disturbingly below the normal temperature of tedium he worked so hard to maintain. Years later, when Charles died, my father was the only white man to attend the funeral. He wasn’t welcome, but he went anyway and sat in the front row. After Charles’s death my father became more scattered and apprehensive. He would sit up all night with a stopwatch, counting his pulse.
That had been another city – Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled on to the flowered congoleum floor.
*
In my naïveté I imagined that all poor people, black and white, liked each other and that here, through Fountain Square, I would feel my way back to the street, that smell of burning honey, that blood as red as mine and that steady, colorless flare in the glass chimney . . . These hillbillies on the square with their drawling and spitting, their thin arms and big raw hands, nails ragged, tattoos a fresher blue than their eyes set in long sallow faces, each eye a pale blue ringed by nearly invisible lashes – I wove these men freely into the cloth of the powerful poor, a long bolt lost in the dark that I was now pulling through a line of light.
I opened a book and pretended to read under the weak streetlamps, though my attention wandered away from sight to sound. “Freddy, bring back a beer!” someone shouted. Some other men laughed. No one I knew kept his nickname beyond twelve, at least not with his contemporaries, but I could hear these guys calling each other Freddy and Bobby, and I found that heartening, as though they wanted to stay, if only among themselves, as chummy as a gang of boys. While they worked to become as brutal as soon enough they would be, I tried to find them softer than they’d ever been.
Boots approached me. I heard them before I saw them. They stopped, every tan scar on the orange hide in focus beyond the page I held that was running with streaks of print. “Curiosity killed the damn pussy, you know,” a man said. I looked up at a face sprouting brunet sideburns that swerved inward like cheese knives toward his mouth and stopped just below his ginger mustaches. The eyes, small and black, had been moistened genially by the beers he’d drunk and the pleasure he was raking in his own joke.
“Mighty curious, ain’t you?” he asked. “Ain’t you!” he insisted, making a great show of the leisurely, avuncular way he settled close beside me, sighing, and wrapped a bare arm – a pale, cool, sweaty, late-night August arm – around my thin shoulders. “Shit,” he hissed. Then he slowly drew a breath like ornamental cigarette smoke up his nose, and chuckled again. “I’d say you got Sabbath eyes, son.”
“I do?” I squeaked in a pinched soprano. “I don’t know what you mean,” I added, only to demonstrate my newly acquired baritone, as penetrating as an oboe; the effect on the man seemed the right one: sociable.
“Yessir, Sabbath eyes,” he said with a downshift into a rural languor and rhetorical fanciness I associated with my storytelling paternal grandfather in Texas. “I say Sabbath ‘cause you done worked all week and now you’s resting them eyeballs on what you done made – or might could make. The good things of the earth.” Suddenly he grew stern. “Why you here, boy? I seed you here cocking your hade and spying up like a biddy hen. Why you watching, boy? What you watching? Tell me, what you watching?”
He had frightened me, which he could see – it made him laugh. I smiled to show him I knew how foolish I was being. “I’m just here to—”
“Read?” he demanded, taking my book away and shutting it. “Shi-i-i . . .” he hissed again, steam running out before the t. “You here to meet someone, boy?” He’d disengaged himself and turned to stare at me. Although his eyes were serious, militantly serious, the creasing of the wrinkles beside them suggested imminent comedy.
“No,” I said, quite audibly.
He handed the book back to me.
“I’m here because I want to run away from my father’s house,” I said. “I thought I might find someone to go with me.”
“Whar you planning to run to?”
“New York.”
There was something so cold and firm and well-spoken about me – the clipped tones of a businessman defeating the farmer’s hoaxing yarn – that the man dropped his chin into his palm and thought. “What’s today?” he asked at last.
“Saturday.”
“I myself taking the Greyhound to New Yawk Tuesday mawning,” he said. “Wanna go?”
“Sure.”
He told me that if I’d bring him forty dollars on Monday evening he’d buy me my ticket. He asked me where I lived and I told him; his willingness to help me made me trust him. Without ever explicitly being taught such things, I’d learned by studying my father that at certain crucial moments – an emergency, an opportunity – one must act first and think later. One must suppress minor inner objections and put off feelings of cowardice or confusion and turn oneself into a simple instrument of action. I’d seen my father become calm when he’d taken Blanche’s daughter to the hospital. I’d also watched him feel his way blindly with nods, smiles and monosyllables toward the shadowy opening of a hugely promising but still vague business deal. And with women he was ever alert to adventure: the gauzy transit of a laugh across his path, a minor whirlpool in the sluggish flow of talk, the faintest whiff of seduction . . . .
I, too, wanted to be a man of the world and dared not question my new friend too closely. For instance, I knew a train ticket could be bought at the last moment, even on board, but I was willing to assume either that a bus ticket had to be secured in advance or that at least he thought it did. We arranged a time to meet on Monday when I could hand over the money (I had it at home squirreled away in the secret compartment of a wood tray I’d made the previous year in shop). Then on Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. he’d meet me at the corner near but not in sight of my house. He’d have his brother’s car and we’d proceed quickly to the 6:45 bus bound East – a long haul to New Yawk, he said, oh, say twenty hours, no, make that twenty-one.
“And in New York?” I asked timidly, not wanting to seem helpless and scare him off but worried about my future. Would I be able to find work? I was only sixteen, I said, adding two years to my age. Could a sixteen-year-old work legally in New York? If so, doing what?
“Waiter,” he said. “A whole hog heaven of resty-runts in New Yawk City.”
Sunday it rained a hot drizzle all day and in the west the sky lit up a bright yellow that seemed more the smell of sulfur than a color. I played the piano with the silencer on lest I awaken my father. I was bidding the instrument farewell. If only I’d practiced I might have supported myself as a cocktail pianist; I improvised my impression of sophisticated tinkling – with disappointing results.
As I took an hour-long bath, periodically emptying an inch of cold water and replacing it with warm, I thought my way again through the routine: greeting the guests, taking their orders, serving pats of butter, beverages, calling out my requests to the chef . . . my long, flat feet under the water twitched sympathetically as I raced about the restaurant. If only I’d observed waiters all those times. Well, I’d coast on charm.
As for love, that, too, I’d win through charm. Although I knew I hadn’t charmed anyone since I was six or seven, I consoled myself by deciding people out here were not susceptible to the petty larceny of a beguiling manner. They responded only to character, accomplishments, the slow accumulations of will rather than the sudden millinery devisings of fancy. In New York I’d be the darling boy again. In that Balzac novel a penniless young man had made his fortune on luck, looks, winning ways. New Yorkers, like Parisians, I hoped and feared, would know what to make of me. I carried the plots and atmosphere of fiction about with me and tried to cram random events into those ready molds. But no, truthfully, the relationship was more reciprocal, less rigorous – life sang art’s songs, but art also took the noise life gave and picked it out as a tune (the cocktail pianist obliging the humming drunk).
Before it closed I walked down to a neighborhood pharmacy and bought a bottle of peroxide. I had decided to bleach my hair late Monday night; on Tuesday I’d no longer answer the description my fath
er would put out in his frantic search for me. Perhaps I’d affect an English accent as well; I’d coached my stepmother in the part of Lady Bracknell before she performed the role with the Emerald City Players and I could now say cucumber sandwich with scarcely a vowel after the initial fluty u. As an English blond I’d evade not only my family but also myself and emerge as the energetic and lovable boy I longed to be. Not exactly a boy, more a girl, or rather a sturdy, canny, lavishly devout tomboy like Joan of Arc, tough in battle but yielding before her visionary Father. I wouldn’t pack winter clothes; surely by October I’d be able to buy something warm.
A new spurt of hot water as I retraced my steps to the kitchen, clipped the order to the cook’s wire or flew out the swinging doors, smiling, acted courteously and won the miraculously large tip. And there, seated at a corner table by himself, is the English lord, silver-haired, recently bereaved; my hand trembles as I give him the frosted glass. In my mind I’d already betrayed the hillbilly with the sideburns who sobbed with dignity as I delivered my long farewell speech. He wasn’t intelligent or rich enough to suit me.
When I met him on Monday at six beside the fountain and presented him with the four ten-dollar bills, he struck me as ominously indifferent to the details of tomorrow’s adventure which I’d elaborated with such fanaticism. He reassured me about the waiter’s job and my ability to do it, told me again where he’d pick me up in the morning – but, smiling, dissuaded me from peroxiding my hair tonight. “Just pack it – we’ll bleach you white whin we git whar we goan.”
We had a hamburger together at the Grasshopper, a restaurant of two rooms, one brightly lit and filled with booths and families and waitresses wearing German peasant costumes and white lace hats, the other murky and smelling of beer and smoke – a man’s world, the bar. I went through the bar to the toilet. When I came out I saw Alice, the woman I’d worked with, in a low-cut dress, skirt hiked high to expose her knee, hand over her pearl necklace. Her hair had been restyled. She pushed one lock back and let it fall again over her eye, the veronica a cape might pass before an outraged bull: the man beside her, who now placed a grimy hand on her knee. She let out a shriek – a coquette’s shriek, I suppose, but edged with terror. (I was glad she didn’t see me, since I felt ashamed of the way our family had treated her.)