by John Sanford
“I suppose you crushed him again,” the hack-driver said.
“I tried. I said I thought the Bolsheviki didn’t believe in landlords.”
“But, like you say, he don’t crush easy.”
“He don’t crush at all. He said it didn’t make any difference whether you believe in landlords or not. As long as you had them, you either paid rent or you slept in the park.”
“That left him open like a door! In Russia, the landlords sleep in the park!”
“I brang that up too, but I’m sorry I did.”
“Why? How’d he get around it?”
“He said this wasn’t Russia.”
“What kind of an answer was that?”
“I don’t know, but it must’ve been good.”
“What was good about it?” the hack-driver said.
“It crushed me,” Danny said.
* * *
There was no sugar-sack of coins to be emptied and counted that evening: the boy’s share of profits for the second year of his partnership had been entered week by week in a little blue bankbook issued by the Corn Exchange. This lay before him on the table now, its pages partly open, and being only a symbol for cash, itself only a symbol, it seemed as lifeless to him as the paper moth it resembled.
“A hundred and thirty bucks,” the hack-driver said. “That’s a real stand of alfalfa.”
“I must’ve shone a thousand pairs of shoes,” the boy said.
“What’re you going to do with all this mazuma?”
“I don’t know. Save it, I guess.”
“I thought kids wanted all kinds of stuff. Fish-rods. Duds. Things.”
“I never go fishing, and I got enough clothes.”
“But not enough money!” the hack-driver said. “Not enough money!”
His wife said, “Wait a minute, now.”
“Wait, hell! There’s a selfish streak in this kid that runs from his scalp to his crotch, and it’s stiff enough to hold him together if he breaks his back! He stuck that dough in the bank to stop me from loaning it! I’m wise to him, and I’ll be buggered if I like it!”
“How do you know why he banked the money?”
“Ask him!”
“Is Pop right, Danny?”
“Yes,” the boy said.
The hack-driver bounced his pipe on the table, flinging coals and ash over the oilcloth, and rising, he looked down at his son and said, “You little piece of cheese!”
The woman herded the dottle into a cupped hand. “If he’s a little piece,” she said, “then we must be big pieces.”
“What kind of crap is that, Polly? Did we teach him to be a stinker?”
“No, but I guess we didn’t teach him not to be.”
“We never taught him not to kill, either, but that wouldn’t make us responsible if he did. All I know is, all of a sudden I can’t stand the sight of my own flesh and blood. I never claimed to be much, but, Christ, nobody can say I’m small about money. People like us’ve got to know the value of a buck, but I always thought it was a hundred cents, not a hundred and four, like our cheesy son thinks. A buck ain’t a buck to him. It’s a buck plus interest—and that’s something he picked up outside of this big beautiful palace of three rooms and a watercloset.”
“I don’t blame anybody but myself,” the boy said. “I been thinking I was selfish for a long time, and now I’m sure of it.”
His mother laughed. “Sit down, Dan,” she said to her husband. “I think we can save something out of this wreck.”
“I’d sooner stand,” the hack-driver said. “If I get mad again, I won’t have to jump up. I can holler from here.”
“Danny,” the woman said, “the hardest thing in the world is to get a person to admit he’s wrong. Once he does that, the rest is easy. With you, there’s no trouble at all. You realize you’ve been selfish, and all that remains is to stop.”
“And if you can’t stop by yourself,” the hack-driver said, “I can always help with a paste in the mouth.”
“He won’t do any pasting,” the woman said.
“I know it,” the boy said. “He’s talking big for Mr. Nobody.”
“He won’t do any pasting for a very simple reason: the only one who can cure selfishness is the person who’s selfish. It can’t be done from the outside.”
“I’ve tried to do it from the inside,” the boy said, “but it doesn’t do any good. You can’t get over a thing just by telling yourself it’s wrong. Remember that night last summer when we counted the money I made? Well, when I finally went and handed it over, you started to cry, and Pop gave me a wonderful look, like I was the best boy in the world—but I didn’t feel that way the next day, and I never felt that way again. I guess if it’s hard to admit you’re wrong, it’s even harder to do anything about it.”
“I remember that night very well,” the woman said. “You began by wanting to keep the money for yourself, by being selfish, but as soon as you gave it to Pop, that changed—you changed.”
“I don’t see how I could’ve. If I started out being selfish, that’s what I really was, and I didn’t get to be different just because I felt sorry.”
The woman spoke over her shoulder to her husband, saying, “You can sit down now, Dan. I don’t think you’re going to get mad any more.” She studied the boy for a moment and said, “Never eat your heart out for being human, son. Anybody on earth would’ve felt as you did—anybody would’ve hated to give up what he’d worked so hard for. The world being what it is, you only felt what all people would’ve felt, and I don’t want you to blame yourself for it—especially when you came up with the right thing in the end.”
The boy said, “You mean if I gave Pop this money now, after first wanting to keep it for myself, I wouldn’t be selfish?”
“It’s what you do in the end that counts, not what you feel in the beginning.”
Danny moved the bankbook across the table until it touched his father’s hand. “It’s yours,” he said.
The hack-driver broke the contact. “Feelings don’t count with your mother,” he said, “but they count with me. I want to know what kind you’ll have tomorrow.”
“I don’t know,” the boy said.
“What kind do you think?”
“I think maybe I’ll have a good kind.”
“Last year it was a lousy kind.”
“I know,” the boy said, “but I’m older now.”
* * *
The woman came from the kitchen with a tray of food. “I thought you men might like a snack before you went to bed. A shack, my mother used to say.”
“Shack” the hack-driver said. “Where’d she get that pronunciation?”
“She had a lot of funny ones. Fresh was always frush, and cherry was always churry, and spinach was always spinit, and her heart, as she described it, thobbed and thobbed.”
Danny helped himself to a wedge of cake brought home from a party at Tootsie’s that afternoon. “I used to say dicktective”
The hack-driver said, “I was twenty years finding out about the pot in depot.”
“My mother used to call Web a runny gate” the woman said. “And he was going to wind up bad because he did too much sky-gacking.”
“What’s sky-gacking?” Danny said.
“Stargazing. You’re a sky-gacker yourself.”
“I guess I’m going to wind up bad.”
“Well, you’re getting off with a headstart,” the hack-driver said. “You’re broke.”
“A person doesn’t have to wind up bad because he sets out poor,” the woman said. “Look at Lincoln.”
“You look. I’m busy watching everybody else that was born in a log cabin, because they’re going to die there too. Me, I had poverty when I was a kid, and I never got cured.”
“But you’re not winding up bad,” the woman said.
“No?” the hack-driver said. “What do you call this?” He took his eyes on a sight-seeing tour of the room, pausing here and there at points of interest:
an oak sideboard tattooed with circular soaks of ink; a buckhorn hatrack; four stuttering chairs left from a silent set of six; an engraving of The Horse Fair, now foxed; a row of giltless books; a waffled couch that for ten years had served as a boy’s bed; and a map of the United States. “I suppose this is good,” he said.
“Rich and good don’t mean the same thing.”
“They do if you’re poor,” the hack-driver said, and he laughed without laughter. “Remember what you said, Polly? ‘Let’s start the kid off with nothing and see how far he gets. I got my heart set on seeing how far he gets with nothing.’ Well, you’re going to have your wish.”
“I still want it,” the woman said.
“And after fifteen years, I still ask why.”
“A person can’t be honest if he has money.”
“You mean you wanted me to be broke all my life so’s this bed wetter could be another Washington?”
“Washington wasn’t so honest,” Danny said. “He told the truth about the cherry-tree because he got caught with his pants down. A person isn’t really honest unless he tells the truth with his pants up.”
“And if you’re rich,” the woman said, “your pants’re always down.”
“That’s what has me up a stump,” the hack-driver said. “Why can’t a rich man be honest? There ain’t no law against it. Every millionaire can’t be a crook, and every poor slob can’t be a Boy Pioneer. I don’t see what money’s got to do with it.”
“Do you, Danny?” the woman said.
The boy said, “The two times I had money, I turned out to be a weasel.”
The woman looked at her husband and then at the occupant of the fourth chair, Mr. Nobody. “My old man thinks you can be rich but honest,” she said.
“Leave Mr. Nobody out of it,” the hack-driver said. “There’s no such thing as money in the world he lives in. He don’t pay no rent, he don’t eat, he never gets sick, and he’s tax-exempt. Where I sit, it’s different. I work for a living, and all I got to show for it is a wife that’s still kind of cute, a son that’s honest but goofy, and two bucks worth of furniture—but day in and day out I have to listen to how sinful it is to be rich. Christ, let me be a sinner for a change! I’m tired of seeing how far I can get with nothing! I know the answer by heart—now heres!”
“You got further than you’ll ever know, you fool, and Danny’ll get even further.”
“When I was his age,” the hack-driver said, “I could take apart any machine ever put together, and I could stick it all back and make it factory-new, and I could even add a little something that the factory never thought of. I used to look forward to making a mark with that knack, but all that happened to me was an assful of bunions, and it’ll happen to anybody unless he’s another Abe Lincoln. I’ve got all kinds of respect for Danny, but I have to say that Abe’s still safe, and what sank me is going to sink my son: money. He’s going to need it for his own kids some day, and he’s going to need it for a couple of broken-down parents, just like I did, and he’s going to have to go out and pick it where it grows—in somebody else’s backyard. He’s going to have to work for the future and the past at the same time, one pulling him ahead and the other pulling him back, and he’ll be stopped cold, like I was. I ain’t sore at nobody for that. I’m only reading it like it’s wrote.”
“I’m starting to get mighty sore at money,” Danny said.
NO COPPISH
Thirty-odd heads were bowed over thirty-odd papers, on each of which a representation of a paramecium was taking shape. The model that thirty-odd hands were engaged in copying was printed on a chart hanging from the blackboard of the Biology Lab., and thirty-odd boys (from Aaronson to Zachary) were drawing thirty-odd pictures, all of them different. The one that Danny Johnson was endeavoring to grow hair on resembled the island of Manhattan: it was long, like the strip of land, and narrowing toward some protozoan Spuyten Duyvil; its nucleus, dark and almost square, was Central Park; and like the docks in the rivers, its cilia stood on end.
The three-o’clock bell rang, a monitor collected the papers for Dr. McElroy, and the class was dismissed. When Danny left the building, he headed not for 59th Street with the converging run of boys, but for the quiet brownstone block to the south, a block of five-story walk-ups trimmed at the street-level with brass piping that curved into and out of each vestibule. Halfway between Tenth and Ninth Avenues, he stopped to wait for Miss Juno Forrest.
The sky was chalked like the window of a vacant store, and a damp east wind opened sheets of newspaper, turned the pages, and flung them away west along the gutter. There was snow in the air, an early-winter snow, and when it fell, it would fall as transient slush. Danny watched a boy coming toward him from Ninth Avenue. The boy was flogging each section of the brass rail with the bones of a broken umbrella, and skipping the one that Danny was leaning against, he resumed his music making on the section beyond. Danny turned to watch him go, and from Tenth Avenue, her head down in the wind, came Miss Forrest.
“Hello,” Danny said, and he joined her.
“Hello,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“Oh, I’m always here. Even when you’re not.”
“I thought you’d find it too cold today.”
“I like the cold.”
“What’s that paper sticking out of your book?”
“This?” Danny said, touching a green throwaway. “A guy gave it to me in the lunch room. Mig DeLuca, his name is. An Italian. There’s going to be a meeting where two of his people are the speakers.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“One is called Sacco. I forget the other.”
“Vanzetti?” the teacher said.
“Something like that.”
“You couldn’t’ve read the paper very carefully. Sacco and Vanzetti are in jail in Massachusetts. The meeting is probably being held for their benefit.”
“What’re they in jail for?” Danny said.
“They killed somebody and stole a lot of money.”
“Why is the meeting for their benefit, then?”
“Some people don’t believe they’re guilty. They say they didn’t have a fair trial.”
“Are you one of those people?”
“No,” the teacher said. “Are you?”
“I never heard of Sacco and Vanzetti before, but I know Mig DeLuca, and he wouldn’t be for anybody that stole.”
“Sacco and Vanzetti are anarchists.”
“What’s an anarchist?”
“A person who doesn’t believe in government.”
“What does he believe in?”
“In being without a government.”
“Without a particular government?” Danny said.
“Without all government—good or bad, democratic or autocratic.”
“Why doesn’t an anarchist want any government?”
“He thinks people can govern themselves.”
“That isn’t such a terrible thing to think.”
“No one has a right to think what’s wrong.”
“I thought you had a right to think anything.”
“Not if you think it with a gun in your hand. These two Italians stood for the abolition of government, but when they went out to kill and steal, they proved that they needed government more than anybody else, and the Court sent them to jail.”
“For doing bad things or for being anarchists?”
“I don’t believe that’s very important.”
“I do. I think it’s the only thing that’s important. I think you have to know if the Court hated bad things, or if it only hated an archists, like you do.”
“What difference would that make?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it would make the difference between justice and unjustice.”
“That sounds very farfetched to me.”
“Maybe it is,” Danny said. “I better go to that meeting and find out.”
They were nearing the teacher’s house now, and now they w
ere standing on the sidewalk before the glass doors, and now they looked at each other for a moment, and now they said, “Good afternoon,” and turned away, the woman to the gray building and the boy to the gray street, and now the first of the snow began to fall.
WHEN CLINTON WAS THE GOVERNOR
In the gutters, black mounds of snow melted under the spring sun, some of them crumbling to reveal their white cores, but Danny, waiting for Miss Forrest in the hothouse air, felt grown by it, felt expanded instead of shrunk, and absorbing warmth among the ruins of winter, he knew (without knowing why) that it was a day to be remembered, and for remembrance he put away images of sparrows on the swarthy sherbet, of a cat lionizing itself, of a dog ambushing its own tail, of people who came from houses as if from hiding, and he would remember too that it was a day when sound seemed to live long and travel far.
[It was a day when Mig DeLaca had said, “It’s a hell of a day for my people to be in jail. We have their pictures on the wall in my house, and every night my father drinks a glass of wine to them, and my mother bows her head and cries, and when I go to bed, sometimes I cry too, because I know that drinking wine and bowing the head and writing letters to the Governor will not save my people”]
And now Miss Forrest was saying, “Come down to earth, Danny.”
IN EIGHTEEN TWENTY-FOUR
“It was a hundred years ago,” Danny said.
“When Clinton was the Governor.”
“A long time—a hundred years.”
“It isn’t so long, now that they’re over. Sometimes a day is long, but that’s only while it’s going on. When tomorrow comes, the thing we called today never seems long or short: it’s just gone.”
“It’s only the young who have no past.”
“You’re young,” Danny said.
The woman laughed. “Nothing looks old on a day like this, not even a teacher.”
A day of hot sun and sparkle. A day of shimmer over asphalt and clouds like laundry on a line. A day of slow-motion, of objects barely avoiding obstacles, as sticks pass stones in a stream.
“I don’t mean you’re as young as I am,” Danny said. “But a person can be older than me and still be young.”