Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  “Does Jules ever turn that sign off?” Sam asked Mary.

  “Good Friday between twelve and three.”

  “Serious?”

  “One year Father Carmody from St. Theresa’s made a big deal that Jules had his sign on during the time of the crucifixion. Jules said that if Mr. Jesus Christ ever came to Belvedere, he’d be more at home drinking with the honest people in the Sahara Room than hanging out with some hypocritical clergymen. But he turned it off.”

  “The Second Coming in the Sahara Room?” Jay said. “If Christ hung around till Jules put up his dinner menu, he’d really know what they meant by ‘The Last Supper.’”

  Sam and Jay began to trade Jules stories, and Mary sat back in her chair and watched Jay, as she had been for the past few days, furtively. She was a woman in a man’s job, and she still had to be very careful. At first she had been too eager for help, and one reporter had tutored her, but it was not long before she realized he just wanted someone to sit at his feet. When she got too good too fast, he began to criticize her and make disparaging remarks to others about her stories. After that she had asked for no help at all and tried to learn by watching, by trial and error. But Jay had sensed her uncertainty on the way to the crash and had told her what she had to know — “This is easy. The cops or the firemen have all the information you need,” and it turned out to be true. So maybe there were ways of taking help without admitting weakness; giving it without making a claim. Men did it. There were so many unwritten rules, rules that men knew because they were men. For her, it was like walking in a minefield.

  Most of the staff had assembled, which meant Charlie Layhmer would be coming in soon. He had a fondness for entrances.

  Mary looked at Jay again. He was absentmindedly doodling on a piece of paper, spirals and curlicues. She was fascinated by his hands. They were long and graceful, the hands of an artist. Suddenly she thought about those lovely, graceful, masculine hands moving to the buttons of her sweater, undoing them, sliding to the flesh beneath.

  She flushed, feeling the heat rising to her face, and she stared down at her hands and hoped no one was watching her. She had to stop doing this. She found herself staring, in the car, at those long, graceful hands on the wheel, and the other day, when he had pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his collar, she’d stared transfixed at the patch of dark hair that was visible just above his undershirt. The sight had unexpectedly brought a flush of desire, and she’d looked away quickly, horrified that he might suspect. And if he didn’t, Charlie Layhmer — due any minute now — surely would. Charlie was so smart, she thought, that he could read anybody’s mind.

  “All right everybody, listen up. Oh for heaven’s sakes!” (He would stare right at her.) “What is it! What’s wrong!”

  “Ah, we are having a staff meeting here, and I just wish you would stop undressing one of your fellow Blade staff members and concentrate on the business at hand.”

  “No, I’m not doing that.”

  “You are thinking about the penis of one of our valuable staff members. You are wondering what he would look like naked.”

  “Oh no, I’m not, I swear!”

  “In fact, you are thinking about him wearing a black jersey and jeans, and he is taking off the jersey and you are thinking how very much you like the hair on his chest, it’s just thick enough, not all over like a gorilla but not too skimpy either. Now he is taking off the jeans, and he is wearing black Jockey briefs and you are staring at the bulge he makes in his shorts.”

  “Oh, my God, how do you know!”

  “I know everything. Now can we please get on with the meeting!”

  “Oh yes, I won’t think about penises anymore, I promise. ”

  “Well, I should hope not!”

  Then Charles Layhmer walked into the room. He was a small, round man with a receding hairline and a face the shape of the full moon. He looked, Mary thought, impossibly benign. It was a camouflage that enticed adversaries to recklessness. If they looked closely, they might notice a slight dilation of the nostrils, a glitter in the eye, that meant he was about to strike. Charles Layhmer approached an enemy with the sense of anticipation some men reserve for lovemaking. He cherished moronic politicians, timid bureaucrats, book-banning mothers and stupid cops. He had worked for several large papers, but they did not appreciate his talent. The big papers preferred a more tranquil breed of man.

  “All right, boys and girls, we have a big one,” he said. “The city council has come up with its urban renewal plan. They’re going to rehab the shopping district, and that’s fine. But the whole area between Maryland Avenue and Manchester Street is slated for the bulldozer, to make way for stores and garden apartments.”

  “But that area is where all the Negroes live,” Mary said.

  “By some strange coincidence, it is.”

  “Charlie, a lot of those places down there need to be knocked down. The houses are in terrible shape,” Milt Beerman volunteered.

  “That’s right. But where does the city council plan to put the people who live there? In those garden apartments that start at a hundred and eighty a month?”

  “They say that they can relocate everybody in existing housing,” Sam said.

  “That’s bullshit. There’s very little low-cost housing outside that area, and few people who are willing to rent to Negroes anyhow. What the council wants to do is shove Negroes out of the city and dump them on the county. This is how we do Jim Crow in the North, get people out of sight and out of mind. Reverend Johnson, down at AME Zion, says he wants to stop the whole plan unless it includes affordable housing for people who live there now.”

  “Don’t the feds have dough for that?” Milt asked.

  “Sure, but the city has to ask. And the council wants no part of it.”

  “That sucks,” Sam said.

  “I hear Joe Tarbell on the council is part owner of one of the construction firms that will make a killing. If it’s true, hang him. I want everybody on this,” Charlie ordered.

  He handed out assignments and told Mary that he wanted her to interview people in the area slated for destruction. “Ask them if they want to move, where they’d go, how much they could afford. Take Jay with you. I want pix on that. All right, everybody out. And I don’t want a big pile of overtime slips. I’ve got too many of those already!”

  They walked together out of the building, and Jay said to her, “You know, we’re all going to bust our humps, and he’s going to turn down the overtime slips. He’s going to take that stupid stamp of his that says DISAPPROVED, and he’s going to stomp all over us.”

  “I know,” she said. “He always does. But we do the work, don’t we?”

  She walked next to him, and his arm brushed against hers, sending a jolt of electricity through her. He did not appear to notice. But he seemed in no hurry, walking more slowly than usual. The spring sunshine was warm on her face, and she had a sudden thought she hadn’t had for a long time, how good it was to be alive. If she could just keep on walking, her arm touching his, for a very long time, how lovely that would be. If things were different, if she were not a married woman with a child — no, that was a foolish thing to even consider. Enjoy the moment. There was no harm in that.

  It was a short drive to the section of town that was called, unofficially, Niggertown. It was no different from a thousand others like it in small cities across the nation. The abandoned mower factory peered dolefully down on a street of sagging houses. The postwar prosperity that had produced a nation of split-level ranches bearing the names of colonial patriots, of shopping centers awash in an ocean of parking lots, the world of Disposalls and dryers and inlaid vinyl flooring, had not taken root in Niggertown. The warm spring air carried a curious blend of smells — new grass, smoke, the acrid scent of burning rubber. Three young children, wearing only cotton shirts and underpants, played on a plank that had been laid across an uneven puddle of muddy water. Mary walked along the street beside Jay, feel
ing as alien as if she had just dropped from Mars.

  White children from good families in Belvedere stayed away from Niggertown as they would have stayed away from a plague ship. It was rumored that you could get anything in Niggertown, from dope to illicit sex and illegal abortions. Nice white girls who walked into Niggertown might not emerge; it was a well-known fact that black men lusted after nothing more than white women, and that Negroes in general would go to any length to slake their animalistic desires. They were, after all, much closer to the jungle than white people. In Belvedere High there was a story, believed by one and all, that a respectable white teenage girl had taken a wrong turn while driving her parents’ car to the store and had been abducted by a gang of black men, taken into a house and given all sorts of drugs, after which she became mad with unnatural lust and engaged in an orgy with all the men present, for days on end. When she awakened alone and ravaged several days later in the bedroom of a deserted house, she went quite mad with the enormity of what she had done. After all, going out to the market to get some Cheetos and winding up a participant in an interracial orgy of drugs and lust could certainly dent the equanimity of the average teenager.

  She was sent to an institution, where, according to legend, she repeatedly tried to kill herself by plunging anything she could find — thermometers, mop handles, the daily paper, the items varied with the imagination of the storyteller in the girls’ locker room — into her vagina. (There were no end of stories of girls coming to grief as a result of peculiar things entering their sexual apertures; the Freudian symbolism was perhaps not appreciated by the eager listeners.)

  The children of Niggertown had their own elementary schools, and a few of them went to Belvedere High, where they kept mainly to themselves and did not become cheerleaders or go to the prom. Though she had lived in Belvedere all her life, Mary had never walked the streets of this section of town and had driven through it only since she’d joined the newspaper staff.

  They strolled along the street, and Jay paused in front of one of the houses. “How about here?”

  “Fine.”

  They climbed the porch of the lopsided wooden house. Part of the stairs had rotted away, and Mary snagged the heel of her shoe on a loose board. The front door was open, and she rapped on the frame with her fist.

  A figure materialized; a faded pink housecoat, a narrow black face dominated by a flare of nostrils. The face was lined; the dark hair was steel wool streaked with gray.

  “Hello,” Mary said. “We’re from the Blade.” Her voice sounded strained and tinny to her ear. She was starting to get the hang of talking to people she didn’t know who were unlike herself. “We’re doing a story about urban renewal. Can we talk to you?”

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  They walked into the dim light of the living room, and Mary looked around, cataloging the details for later use: a wrinkled green rug on a stained linoleum floor; the hole in the couch that was barely covered by a flowered throw; the metal floor lamp with no shade and, immobile as the furniture, the old man who sat on the bed by the window. He was barefoot, his large, dark feet resting on the floor. He wore trousers, a white undershirt and suspenders. She hadn’t seen suspenders in years. She remembered, dimly, that her father used to wear them. The whole scene was as exotic to her as a Persian marketplace might have been.

  “I’m his niece,” the woman said. “I don’t live here, I live in D.C., but I come up to stay with him. He don’t get around so good anymore.”

  “Do you think the city needs public housing?”

  “You move the people out of here and don’t build nothing and where are they going to go? Where’s he going to go? I have a houseful of family where I live, there’s no room.”

  The change in her was startling. No longer was she placid; anger rippled through her words and seemed to crackle even in the ends of her hair. “This here’s an old house. You try everything, but you can’t get the bugs out. When I sleep here, I put cotton in my ears so the roaches don’t get in them. But it’s his house. They got no right to take it and give him nothing.”

  At the house next door, a woman sat on a drooping porch. She shoved a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s behind the leg of a chair as Jay and Mary approached. She was young, possessed of a fleshy prettiness that was collapsing into fat. By the side of the house a young girl with fresh, darting eyes played in an abandoned tire. The woman listened to Mary’s questions, but her eyes were focused someplace else, as if she were looking at a landscape no one else could see.

  “I doan want to live in no project.”

  “Where would you live if this house were torn down?”

  “I doan know. Maybe in the country someplace. I don’t want to live in no project.”

  Mary looked at her, quizzically. She was a board tossed on the sea; she would float wherever the current took her. Very unProtestant. You were supposed to struggle against the elements. As you sow, so also shall you reap. But were there places where it didn’t matter what you did? Where floating was survival? Could that be possible?

  In another house they found a woman with broad shoulders and a laugh that rumbled like summer thunder. She was in her fifties; the house she lived in bore a fresh coat of paint and the porch was studded with new slats of wood.

  “I worked in the Navy Yard in Philadelphia, and I learned a lot about carpentry,” she said. She now worked in a factory thirty miles away to support herself and her two teenage daughters. Her husband was dead. He had been wounded in the invasion of Tarawa, and in the fifteen years he had lived after the war he’d had seven operations and had most of his stomach removed. Once, while he was in the hospital, she slipped carrying a tubful of laundry and was left with a permanent limp.

  “I’ll be glad to see the bulldozer push this old place down,” she said. “I already got a new house, up on Searle Street. It cost fifteen thousand dollars. When I get it fixed up, it’ll look real nice. All the houses down here are falling down. You fix ’em up, and they just fall down again.”

  Now there was a Protestant. What was it that gave one person the will for combat while another chose to drift? Was it something you gulped with your first breath? Could it be lost, or torn out piece by bloody piece?

  She asked Jay about it. “There’s got to be a reason, doesn’t there? What makes the difference? That woman, she should have given up long ago, with all she’s been through. But she didn’t. Why?”

  He looked at her and shook his head. “You ask the damndest questions.”

  “But if we knew the answer to that, we’d know a lot, wouldn’t we? I don’t want to know what people do, I want to know why they do it.”

  “There are some questions that don’t have any answers.”

  “No, I don’t believe that. There are always answers. You just have to find them.”

  “Is it so important to have answers?”

  “To me it is. Maybe it’s because there’s so much to know and I’m so far behind. I wish I could swallow an encyclopedia and know everything.”

  “I don’t think I’d want to know everything,” he said. “A lot of it I wouldn’t like.”

  She shook her head, firmly. “It’s better knowing than not knowing.”

  There were more houses, more brown people. In a three-story house where even the boards seemed weary, an old woman sat in a wheelchair and talked as if they were neighbors come to chat.

  “That’s my son,” she said, pointing at a heavy, silent man frying strips of bacon on the stove. The man did not turn around. A bulb hung from the ceiling, pouring light onto walls decorated with vivid pictures of Christ, all reds and purples, a Christ with soft girl-skin and melting eyes. The woman in the wheelchair said she was seventy-one years old and she received twenty-three dollars a month from the Welfare Department for her medicine. Her son had a good job, and she had a beautiful grandchild, a baby girl. She had family, a place to live; she was blessed. She thanked the Good Lord for her good fort
une. Even the seams in her skin folded into a smile. Mary was awed by her. Was she a saint, or a fool?

  “My grandson has never been out of work, never. He’s worked for the Sanitation Department for seven years.”

  Mary looked at the dark half-moon of the man’s face against the light wall. His lips were dark and full. The rigid set of his shoulders was as eloquent as his silence. He had no wish for these white people to be in his house. She looked at the broad hands gripping the handle of the fork and imagined those hands gripping garbage sacks, pulling them along the ground while the flies and the sickly sweet smell of garbage circled. That smell was always associated in her mind with grown Negro men. The only Negro men she ever saw in her childhood were the garbagemen, strange creatures who even spoke in a language that was peculiar, softer, hard to hear, the ends of the words lost in a purr of sound. The Negro boys in high school rarely spoke in class, and they kept to themselves; now and then the sound of raucous laughter would erupt from the corner of the cafeteria where the Negro kids sat, but around whites they were quiet and solemn.

  She suddenly felt incredibly young and ignorant. How many worlds were there, and how unknowable were they? She looked at the dark man, sensing the chasm that stretched between herself and him.

  It was close to sundown by the time they finished the interviews. They drove back to the paper, and Mary typed up her notes. She took more notes than most reporters. The thickness of the pages was a security blanket. Her male colleagues simply assumed the right to put their stamp on reality, but she examined her judgments like a monk hunting down sin. As a result, she saw life as a surging mass of complexity. At first, she had been terrified of decisions, but she had come to understand that to put words down on paper was to bend time and space. Her stories were rarely brilliant, never flashy, but they were complete, and they left room for nuance, even irony.