A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  [You would say one thing now, and you would say it only once, and if it failed, you would never in your life say it again. You would say these words (and you said them): “God Almighty, please do something for Nick and Bart!”]

  But the minute passed, and no marvel, no wonderwork, came in on the all-purpose air; instead, for a choked-off instant, there was a flurry of syncopation. The clock hid behind its hands in the temporary shame of midnight, but the shame on the faces of people was revealed and lasting, and it seemed to impel strangers to touch in kinship, and they touched most tenderly and best who came together in the fire-union of the smoking-ritual.

  An old man spoke aloud to none and all, saying, “Well, they burned ’em,” and he turned from the news-stand, shaking his head, and again and again as he walked away, he said, “They burned ’em. They burned ’em.…”

  A passenger climbed out of a cab, stood at the curb as the old man went by, and then came down the walk to the crowd. “Burned who?” he said, and for a moment there was no reply. “Who burned?”

  “Sacco and Vanzetti,” someone said.

  “Who the hell’re Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  [Jesus Christ, you thought, when’re us Johnsons going to win a fight?—and you knew that if you didn’t try to win one now, you’d live in an endless and always-growing disgrace.]

  “Who the hell’re Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  [Your left hand made a fist, and you fired it with all the eighteen years of your life, but far more than your self went along: the crow eaten by Julie Pollard went too, and the long and galling ruination of Nick and Bart, and the grief of the lonely and loving man who died with a bullet behind his eyeball, and the sad defeat (“We ain’t getting anywheres!”) of your own father. You saw a straw hat reel into the gutter, you saw drops of blood on the sidewalk, you saw feet dribble someone (without a hat) toward the corner—and then you saw only Miss Forrest.]

  The tottering elevator carried them to the eighth floor and left them on the landing, and then, making off with its feeble light, it tottered down, and they reached the woman’s door blind in the blackness, and Dan said, “I say your name to myself all the time!” and the woman said, “Say it to me, Dan—to me” and he said, “I’m saying it! [“Juno Forrest! “you were saying, “Juno Forrest!“] I’m saying it in my mind! I’m thinking it!” and then the woman opened the door, and they entered rooms only a shade less dark than the hallway, and now more than night, now walls, exiled the world, and of the unrequited years, nothing was left but a common desire to end them, and the woman spoke to a faint face in the gloom, saying, “Tell me what else you’re thinking, Dan.…”

  [You were thinking that you wanted her to be naked (and she made herself naked), and you were thinking that you wanted to be naked too (and naked you were when she helped you), and you were thinking that you wanted to put your hands on her body (and she took them in her own and showed them where to write), and you were thinking that you wanted to do what only your hands had words for (and she drew you down and received you)—and you were thinking that now you were coming to the end of thought, that you were galloping toward it, running away with your self, and then for a long shuddering moment, you were thinking that you weren’t thinking any more.…]

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, Dan.…”

  [“Please excuse me,” you were thinking. “Please excuse me, Nick and Bart.]…”

  * * *

  “… I can only call you Miss Forrest.”

  “But why, Dan? Why can’t you say Juno?”

  “I’d think I was doing something dirty.”

  “What we just did—was that dirty?”

  “A thing can only be dirty if you make it dirty in your mind.”

  “How is my name dirty, then? I don’t understand.”

  “Please don’t be angry at me for this, Miss Forrest, but there was a time when I did dirty things to myself. I was ashamed of them when they were over, but even more I was ashamed of how I’d made believe my hands were you, and how I’d sometimes call them by your name, and how it’d always be your body that I imagined being up against in the dark. I stopped doing the dirty things after a while, but I still punish myself for them, and I do that by never speaking your name and never looking at more of you than your face. I wish I could see you the way you are now, because I know you’d be better than all or anything I was ever able to dream, but I dreamt you naked when I had no right to, and I have to be punished by never seeing you except in my mind. I remember waiting for you in the street and turning away if a wind was blowing, so that I wouldn’t see the shape of your legs and the shape of this, and I remember times when you leaned toward me, and your dress opened a little and showed the space between these, and I looked away then too, and I remember summer days when the light was behind you, and I punished myself by closing my eyes—I thought if I punished myself enough, maybe the time would come when I’d make up for the dirty things, but I’m not all square yet, and somehow I think I’ll never be.”

  “What you did to me in your mind wasn’t a dirty thing—or if it was, Dan, then no dirtier a thing than I’ve often done to you, and with less right than you ever had, because I was a woman, and I was doing the thing to a boy. I tried to punish myself too, by telling you to go away, but I told you only once, because I didn’t really mean it, and because I knew that some day I’d be punished in a way that I could never punish myself: I’d grow older. What you just did, Dan, I’ve longed for for a long time, and I’ll pay for it when I’m too old to make you want to do it again in your mind.”

  “You’ll never be too old, Miss Forrest.”

  They turned to each other.…

  * * *

  It was still dark when he rose to dress, but in the slit below the drawn shade, a fainter hue than the sapphire of the room was visible. to a face he knew was looking up, he spoke down quietly, almost within his own orbit of sound, saying, “Nick and Bart’re only cold meat now, but they can’t be colder than I feel inside, because I realize for the first time that I never heard anyone say he’d change places with them and mean it. They died for everybody else, but nobody would’ve died for them, and when I think of their last minutes, I can imagine how they must’ve hated to go—and how they must’ve hated all of us that stayed behind. All their lives, they only wanted to do great things for people, and people let them, right on up to the greatest, but they were men, and they knew what they were losing, and in the end they must’ve hated all they’d ever loved. I could never blame them for that, not after what you let me do to you tonight—but all the same, I feel cold enough to be dead.”

  “When will you come back, Dan?”

  “Do you want me to come back?”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Shall I look for you this evening?”

  “Yes,” he said. “As soon as it’s dark.”

  * * *

  He crossed Central Park South under a litmus-paper sky that the acid of dawn was dyeing red. The stars were guttering, and the moon seemed to have worn thin and become translucent. As yet, on the hosed-down walks and the sprinkled pavement, few people were about for the early-day and dustless air, but there were many birds on the wall of the park, on the backs of benches, and bustling in shallow puddles along the curb. At Fifth Avenue, Dan turned northward through a vault of elms.

  Day-beginning sounds filled the stair-shaft of the tenement—sleep-slow voices, water on water, fat frying, and the high-pitched language of crockery. At the door of the Johnson flat, Dan paused for a moment without knowing why but wondering, and then he entered, hung up his hat, and stood staring at himself in the mirror near the rack, still wondering and still unanswered. His father rose from a chair at the window, put aside a newspaper, and approached him, silently offering his hand. The son looked down at it, and he fancied it as saying I’m sorry, kid. I wish there was something I could… but there fancy dwindled, and he heard no more. He took the hand and shook it briefly
, and then he went toward his mother, meaning to embrace her. The action was in being before he realized that it had been designed for Miss Forrest, and he bungled in changing the shape of his mouth and the course and aim of his hands.

  After eating, Dan lit a cigarette and sat absently watching the drift of its smoke. He noticed at length that heat from the coffee pot caused the haze to ascend, and for no reason that he was aware of, he drew the pot toward him, flipped open its lid, and drew a deep breath of coffee vapor—and then suddenly fifteen years rewound and came to a stop, and he saw a small boy standing in fascination before a woman wearing a starched shirtwaist and a magic whispering skirt, and over its rustle he heard words that only now he knew he had remembered: Some day you’ll teach him, Miss Morey. The years spun back, and Dan looked at his mother. He found her looking at him.

  * * *

  [The office of the Committee was no longer an office: it was the parlor of Harry Keogh’s house the day he was run over by a truck. Mourners had come to make their muted but vast sounds of sympathy, to say their ungovernable say, meaningless for both the living and the dead, and a picture on a wall was all the Keoghs had to prove that they’d ever owned a son. No less gone were the sons of this family here, and its at empty and empty-handed, staring at likenesses on a wall.] After a few moments, Dan left very quietly, and then for a long time he walked the gumdropped streets of the city, and if he thought any thoughts as he wandered, they failed to remain with his mind. Wherever he went, he went aimlessly, nothing impelling him and nothing detaining, and he saw faces without seeing people, and he heard voices without hearing words, and he emerged from apathy only when a name, long after being sensed, became insistent: Bowling Green.

  By then, he had entered Washington Street from Battery Place and come to a stop before a forty-story butte of steel and stone. Where its marble water-table now rose in a perpendicular from the sidewalk, there once had been three doorways, all of them narrow and all with low lintels, as if built for a smaller breed of men: the left-hand one of these had given into a stationery-store displaying ashen trash and dead flies; the one at the right had led to a dark little shop where all day long a man had sat at the window, licking, pasting, and palming bunches of green-brown leaves, trimming them now and then with a rocker-bladed knife, and then licking, pasting, and palming them more, and always, by evening, the leaves had become cigars; the middle door had been the entrance to a tenement, and in a sudden conceit, Dan supposed going inside, climbing two flights of stairs to a room in a rear flat, and looking down at a bed in which a woman lay, and he supposed the woman to be with child, and the child, now eighteen and a half years old, supposed that he was watching himself being born. [The stub of a cigarette fell at your feet, and, still in the daydream, you glanced upward, ready to glare at some grinning neighbor, but in the punched face of the building, there were no faces at all, grinning or otherwise, and you knew that the candy-store man was forever gone, along with his wonderful windowful of dusty junk, and the cigar-maker with his sheaves of tobacco torpedoes, and the house, and one particular flat, and the mother in labor, and the fruit of that labor—all were gone.]

  The school was still standing and still a visage in the vise of the taller structures on either side, but their grip seemed to have tightened with the years, and more constricted than ever were the many glass eyes, the brownstone brows, and the red-brick cheeks under their red-paint rouge. No voices came from the classrooms in the late-summer afternoon, no thin and trivial songs, and no high thin laughter, and there were no footfalls in the halls, no called-out names, and no gangs with their skirling “Wee-haw-kee!” Near the doorway stood a single boy dedicated to the task of defacing the wall: with a piece of pale blue chalk, he was filling in alternate oblongs of brick. [You remembered the day you had come here for the first time, and you remembered the showcases in the corridor, and you remembered the Principal’s office and the Principal’s name, and you remembered the dazzle of toys on the kindergarten floor, but what you remembered best, because all the rest so soon gave way, was your mother. Why were you thinking of her, you wondered, and why with so paralyzing a pang did you recall the blunder of the kiss?] Many bricks had been powdered blue, but against the vast expanse that remained, they achieved only the effect of a stripe, and the project, once so attractive to the boy, had lost its appeal. He still labored, but he labored less, and now, aware of being watched, he looked at Dan and said, “I guess I picked out the wrong color chalk,” and then he walked away.

  [Blunder, you’d called it, but you knew well that none had been made and, more, nothing done except by design. Still in the dark room of your mind, though, was the reason, and if you thought long enough, the door would open. Did you want it to open? You remembered the day your father had come home from France (it was opening! it was opening itself!), and the flags and the hooded artillery were dim, and the crowds, and the ticker-tapeworms; what was still vivid was your mother’s haste to send you off to school, and always you would hear her voice through the open transom, saying, “I’ve got to make up for that day in Pemberton” And you remembered the Pemberton day too: the engines in the Jersey yards, the snowed-on track, the sooty sky, the brown streams in the white fields, and the long walk on the Rancocas road—and of all those things, the last by far would come first. And you remembered the night, a year earlier, when your father had made up his mind to enlist, but the enlistment had been only a cipher for the words whispered after the lights were out, for the rasping sheets, and the sprung springs, and the single gasp. And now, without symbol or device, you remembered coming into a room and finding your mother naked, and you remembered her anger when she told you to go away, and you remembered your own anger—and her surprise. And you remembered a time when there had been no anger even though both of you had been naked: you had bathed with her, and she had let you play at washing her till you became excited and tried to reach her breast once more with your mouth. And you remembered a time when you had touched her at will, with your mouth, with your hands, with all your body, and often you had slept between her and your father, and she had been more yours than his—and then you were back at the beginning, when she had been yours altogether, a dark and drowsy term like a long night indoors out of the rain.] He understood now the meaning of his recollection that morning of Miss Morey. He knew her to have been the first of many substitutions attempted by his mind, and he knew that the series had ended with Miss Forrest, for in her the aim of them all had been realized: the surrogate had become the principal.

  He glanced about and found himself on the Hudson waterfront near Pier 13 (the DL&W—the Lackawan’), but all the rest of the afternoon he wandered nameless, unnumbered, and deserted streets.

  * * *

  She opened the door during the doorbell’s ring, and in the moment before she stood aside, her figure made a black shadow on the early-evening sky in a window beyond her. He went past her into the entry and paused, looking down at his hat as if it had been given to him by someone else to hold, and then it was taken from him, and he had empty hands until the woman’s body came against him, and he filled them with it, again and again saying, “Juno, Juno…!”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” the woman said. “I thought you might be ashamed.”

  “Of what?” he said.

  “The thing we did last night.”

  “I’m not ashamed of that. I’ll never be.”

  The woman freed herself and moved away, saying, “What did you do all day, Dan?”

  “When I left you,” he said, “I went home, but I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t stay at the office, either. I couldn’t stay anywhere. I walked. I wandered around. I didn’t care where. The only thing I wanted was to keep going, and I did, and after a long time I found myself in front of the house I was born in—at least, in front of where it used to be, because it’s gone now. All the while I was drifting about, I must’ve been heading for that one particular place without knowing it—and without knowing why. I k
now now, though.”

  The woman gazed down at the road-lights in the park, strings of beads strung wide, and she said, “Do you?”

  “I think I went for a last look,” he said, “the kind a person takes before he goes in for the night.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Myself,” he said, “although you’d suppose that would be the one thing you could look at anywhere, the one thing that was always with you. It isn’t: a person is scattered all over, wherever he’s been, and the pieces don’t always go along when he moves away; they stay behind sometimes.”

  “Is that why you came back here this evening?” the woman said. “To find some more of yourself?”

  “To find?” he said. “I don’t want to find anything. All day long, I was only trying to lose.” He went closer to the woman and contemplated her face in the last light from the saffron hem of the sky. “I wanted to see myself once more the way I was, and I did—and now, before the room gets dark, I want to see you.”

  Again the woman disengaged herself, this time to move from place to place and eddy among objects that she idly touched in passing, and still in motion, she said, “What happened today that made you decide to call me Juno?”

  “I didn’t know I’d done that,” he said.

  “Last night, I was Miss Forrest. Tonight, the first word out of your mouth was Juno. Why?”

  “I don’t remember calling you Juno, but if I did, it came out naturally.”

  “Only a few hours ago, using my name would’ve made you feel as if you were doing something dirty. Why don’t you feel dirty now?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I’d only feel dirty now if I called you Miss Forrest. It’d be like saying …”

  The woman reached for a lamp-chain, and the day-end glow was gone from the window and the sky. “Like saying what, Dan?” she said.

  “Like saying the name of my mother,” he said. “I had a lot of peculiar thoughts today. I remembered things I never dreamed were in my mind—things like being jealous of my father as far back as the first time I was able to think, even before, maybe.”