I was killing the roots of my prize with an overdose of plant food when my father called. They hadn’t left for Indianapolis. Grandfather had set up such a racket that the airline wouldn’t let him on board. He screamed that he was being kidnapped. Grandfather saw the next plane at the ramp and jumped over the wheelchair. Security agents chased him up and down the LaGuardia terminal, astonished that a man his age could move so fast in so many directions.
My father brought Grandfather back to the pigeon coop. When I got there Grandfather was very quiet and it was my father’s turn to pace. He reasoned and begged. Grandfather simply said he had some papers to go over, which was to make me hope, long after it had ceased to be possible, that there was some method to his alternating periods of catatonia and excitement. We heard him in his room. He sounded like a burglar and then like a mouse. I struggled not to interfere, not to get up and ask what he was doing. Worry can be the worst form of control. I was afraid he was destroying his shoeboxes and folders of Right Opinions.
There was an argument with my mother in Indianapolis on the wisdom of renting a car. The time not so long before when Grandfather inexplicably leaped into Washington traffic was fresh in our minds. My father said Grandfather got away from him in Washington by trickery. He’d pointed to a character standing under a heated hotel awning, sworn that he knew the man, urged my father to stop the car, and bolted. My father said he should have known better: Grandfather didn’t have any friends.
It was true that, apart from family, Grandfather hadn’t had anyone to call. Though he had long been at the age where his peers would have begun to die, I’d never heard Grandfather speak of any. It was impossible to think how many days or months he had passed at a stretch within his wheat-colored walls with no company other than that of his wife. He struck me as being very much like a jailhouse scholar. “I have something on the inside that the world can’t take away. I’m going to let it shine.”
Once I paid a surprise visit. The stepgrandmother was in the middle of an unstoppable complaint. Grandfather said she was wasting her time. The stepgrandmother said she could cook for her sister if she wanted to. Grandfather said she would have to do her cooking at her sister’s because he would not have them eat his food. She said he didn’t like anybody and nobody liked him, not even his own children had any use for him.
I said I liked him. “He that fears shall find friends.” I was pleased with myself. I’d come up with something at least atmospherically biblical to show that I had sympathy for Grandfather in his line of work. The stepgrandmother said I wouldn’t like Grandfather if I knew what he really thought of me.
Grandfather passed over my offering and said to his wife that peace on earth was predicated on never telling one man what another man has said about him. I was stunned that he had not risen and roundly contradicted her. It had never occurred to me that he didn’t dote on me or that, if he did, his feelings could change. An old man’s loyalties were, I assumed, like a fixed income: barely enough for necessities, a definite amount that didn’t stretch very far, but something to count on.
I’d gone so far as to think of my showing up with a sack of desiccated fruit as a big sacrifice, and the dripping flowers plucked from buckets at the Korean deli as an addition to his life, like the sighting of a comet. She who had once stood behind Grandfather like a rock formation, his immovable support and foundation, said he just liked to hear himself talk and smell his upper lip.
Maybe she carried on every day between morning talk shows and the news. There was a time for lunch, a time for puzzles, and a block of hours left over for trying to get a rise out of Grandfather. She wasn’t going to let my presence throw her off. What I couldn’t tell was how much Grandfather’s restraint was due to me. He was quietly incandescent, saving it up, with traces of a smile playing about lidded eyes.
The stepgrandmother never raised her voice. She kept it to a growl, like the motor of their old refrigerator. She said she was worse off than a woman busting suds. She even had to go out in the rain for light bulbs. Were it not for her he’d be sitting in pitch-dark and not doing a thing about it. Grandfather calmly took her gibes and handed back a guffaw, as if he were passing the salt. She snapped a pencil. Grandfather, she said, was of no use to anyone.
To save the day, I asked what Atlanta had been like in the time of his early mentor, Hugh Proctor, then an important black Congregational minister. The past was Grandfather’s high ground. But he’d long since stopped talking about his past, as if, to live with the stepgrandmother, he had given up memory.
The stepgrandmother said he could fool a little boy but he couldn’t fool her. I said I liked it when Grandfather talked and I was not a little boy. He had not been able to fool the people in Atlanta, she said. They were too up-to-date, that’s why he didn’t like them.
Grandfather laughed—sheepishly, I thought with a contraction of my heart—and said she didn’t know anything about Atlanta, but if she wanted to talk he’d be glad to help her to remember her mother’s dirt floor. She said at least her mother hadn’t been a debtor. She said he left Savannah owing everybody in sight, and if he wanted to name-drop he should mention the IOUs he skipped out on when he made her leave Memphis in the dead of night.
Grandfather said he’d walk me to the corner. Was I to believe her? Rectitude is not always a nice quality; we think of it as going with a kind of spiritual pride. He had to get his mind around quite a lot of things, like everyone else, and I had never heard him say, “I’m sorry.” But many had been taught by him, helped by him through difficult periods, and for them he had been a real figure. They knew there was this problem called his wife.
I couldn’t know what had passed between them all those years. Sometimes what you hear is what there is. Usually, Grandfather and the stepgrandmother sat in different rooms, pointedly not speaking to each other. They nearly answered the question, Which is more painful: the incapacity to live with anyone or the inability to be alone? Perhaps Grandfather had gotten something in the bargain: punishment, expiation, daily confirmation of his other opinion of himself.
Manhattan, that far uptown, in the copse of plain towers, did not exist after dark. No sirens, gangs kicking over trash cans, teens making harmonies on the playground, or stoops for people to crowd. The international depressed style, the concrete hives of the working poor, could have been in any city: Pittsburgh, East Berlin, Mexico City. Periodically the elevator responded to someone either finished with or preparing to report to a late shift. The heady smell of a complicated thing like gumbo came through the vents.
We couldn’t get Grandfather to go to bed. If he was staying awake, so were we. I could feel the coffee clicking through the vessels in the back of my head, then causing what I was convinced were palpitations, ventricular fibrillation. I picked up the prescription form on Riverside Drive and shot across town to an all-night pharmacy on Lexington Avenue. Black men, instant premonitory signs, sat on benches along the road through the park, as if it were afternoon.
I looked through the window of the pharmacy before I entered. In Manhattan, in front of an all-night drugstore, you were sure to meet the weirdest in improvised attire. The man who opened the door for me and thrust out his paper cup emerged from a blanket held together by a wide leather belt with pictures of cowboys. His shoes were wrapped in plastic and he wore a headband made of bent table forks. The clerks inside yelled at him to scram. He saluted and continued his work.
My scanning of the pharmacy made the guys in the plexiglass cage extremely nervous and rude. I switched automatically into the demeanor of reassurance: I was not one of the bad ones. They did not relent. One almost threw my change on the floor. It was insulting to hold out my hand and to have a clerk bang the money on the counter. I’d “tommed” again for nothing.
The taxi I’d paid to wait while I dashed into the pharmacy had gone. I shivered with a displaced anger that turned outward against Grandfather. It was his fault that I was on Lexington Avenue under the seething lights, ne
ver mind that in my self-manipulated, blurred escapades around Manhattan it was just luck that nothing bad had ever happened. A black driver said he’d cut short his break because he’d watched too many other black drivers pass me by.
Grandfather used to talk about the time he took my aunts shopping in Louisville. Girls home from college, they were told in one store they could buy dresses but couldn’t try them on. Manners were morality, he said. He made them leave the store without the dresses. In his way he got it right. I do not believe he believed in his reward—definition everlasting.
His career as a mesmerist of the color line—in the old days it was called “the Veil”—had worn him out long before the morning my father and I spiked his coffee with tranquillizers in order to get him on the plane and into the nursing home. His last wish, he said, was to be left alone. We won and he let us dress him, thick in his Valium trance, radiant with despair. I walked him onto the plane and to his seat. Trembling, he shook my hand and thanked me. He’d forgotten who I was.
The slippery manager of Grandfather’s project said that because of the numerous subsidies and regulations involved, the premises couldn’t be sold unless they passed inspection. He reminded me of stories Hispanics told about immigration officers —La Migra—who’d failed to extract baksheesh. I overlooked his hints and thereafter he ignored my requests for cooperation.
It was left to me to do something with the things that without occupants around to blow life into them had become a ton of junk. I called a mover, a tai chi chu’an instructor widely respected for his hillbilly truck, mule’s back, bohemian working hours, and amateur’s rates. The climax of the evening was spitefully dumping the sofa in a parking space at Yankee Stadium.
The Judge greeted the news that I’d claimed the Philco, the television, the silver, and the caned chairs for myself with a rapid blinking of her eyes. She’d been to the hairdresser’s and in a new copper pants suit looked more like the stepgrandmother’s daughter than her sister. She dragged herself through the empty rooms, stooped and fondled what I had not had time to pack for the Salvation Army. A closet of towels and shower caps was something like paydirt. She said she knew someone who could use the box of screwdrivers and said the same thing about the ancient tins of cocoa and tea.
When I admitted that I’d thrown out an old-fashioned washboard she could no longer contain herself. She accepted the tax-deductible receipt from the Salvation Army with a soundless weeping that made it hard for her to breathe. I asked her to take over the disposal of the apartment, which was too complex for me. There was nothing else to offer other than a broom and dustpan.
The day after I handed over the keys to the Judge the cold spell broke and the People’s Park of shaggy annuals and borders of aluminum cans at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway lost its zoning battle.
Radio-station activists and schoolchildren pelted the bulldozers, but over the months a yellow condominium that, incredibly, resembled a giant cash register rose steadily and, as predicted, swallowed up my field of blue skies. That you could hear your neighbor brushing his teeth through the flimsy walls did not prevent the terraces stacked like aboveground mausoleum slots from selling out before the building was completed.
The Cuban drugstore at Ninety-fifth Street became a gelato shop, which in turn quickly reopened as a sports-shoe boutique and then as a video rental center. A dive popular among short-order cooks was transformed into a restaurant splayed with Art Deco mirrors. When an indifferent coffee shop was born again as a spartan fish store run by obsequious Asians of unspecified nationality, the lady who drew bangs on her forehead with a red Magic Marker was out of luck. To shut her up, the coffee shop always gave her the Blue Plate Special for the price of whatever she had in her purse. She took her profession seriously, wailing in all kinds of weather to the accompaniment of a tape recorder hidden under her pavement-length lime-green chiffon.
Fences went up, deep loamy holes were dug, ineffective POST NO BILL stencils decorated the building sites. The change in the West Side was like having a tooth pulled: once the gaps in a block were filled, you couldn’t remember what had been there before. The police broke up the ring that sold subway slugs. Instead of the bells of store alarms, you were more likely to encounter the deadpan of a new automobile’s voice alarm: “Intruder, intruder.”
My supermarket was still as drab and sparsely populated as the neighborhood churches. Efforts had failed to upgrade its appeal, to push it in the direction of the upscale food emporiums that were wiping out rows of cheesy driving schools, hardware stores, and travel agencies that specialized in flights to San Juan. The supermarket inaugurated an imported cheese bin and the deli wasn’t so deli anymore. There were croissants and baguettes made with too much sugar. One woman said she was waiting for them to feature chocolate-chip Brie.
“I’m ready any time you are,” the checkout girl said. She was beautiful and wore two long gold earrings in her lobeless left ear.
“What?” a man too old for his blond Prince Valiant haircut answered from the manager’s raised booth.
“I said I’m ready when you are. You can check me out. I’m leaving early tonight. Remember?”
“Nope.” He kicked cartons out of his booth. The kid from produce sloped by, cut his eyes at the falling cartons, and kept moving.
“I’m leaving at seven.”
“You leave when someone gets here.”
The pedal at her foot that moved the counter belt was broken. To be helpful, I shoved my purchases toward her. I put on my best it-be’s-that-way-sometime smile.
“What you grinning at? I have to work here and you have to shop here.” She scratched at the expiration date on the milk carton with a bright cherry fingernail. “That so funny?”
I had to walk far to find services like the old tailor or the little cobbler. I must have been asleep for a long time. One morning I noticed that the SRO across the street was boarded up. The mailman said he didn’t care where the tenants had gone. They’d become so brazen in their addictions he saw a streetwalker pick her nose and try to free-base what she’d found there.
The night belonged to the young and their admirers, and as long as the automatic cash machines cooperated, the night went on forever. They said every bartender was a dealer, along with every messenger, and many of the waitresses felt glamorous enough to act as go-betweens for the men who’d lost their briefcases of recruitment brochures and those who read Easy Rider, the magazine of choice among bikers who’d done time. These were the days before crackheads turned Amsterdam Avenue into a river of appliances as they rushed to the pawnbrokers with the last of their—and anyone else’s—worldly goods before closing time.
I got into a snit about new neighbors on Pomander Walk. Legs dangled over plant boxes, champagne watered the hedges. I didn’t think their parties would ever end and wished bats would fly into their hair. The noise disturbed my neighbor upstairs, an elderly woman who was afraid to go out at night or when there was ice on the sidewalks. Sometimes I heard her fall. She explained that now and then her legs just gave out. The impact of person on wood floor sounded like a gun report. She’d tap on the pipes to signal she was okay.
We could always tell when the saxophone player was at home. The flash of what neon there was in the marquee of the movie house was reflected in the blackened windows of buildings awaiting renovation. Also cinematically correct, bald, in plus fours, the musician stood in his window and blew at the steps. He started again in the afternoon, when the mailman sat to listen to a few bars. The mailman said the music reminded him of the days when there was a fountain in Times Square.
He said these days if he dropped a quarter between Seventy-second Street and Ninety-sixth Street he’d kick it to the post office before he’d bend over to pick it up, there were so many queer bars. The saxophone player told him not only were The Boys part of the Great Old Sacrament, “ha-has” had been in the vanguard of the inimical pastel look of gentrification. The boundaries of Sparta were on the tips of their s
pears, he said. Sometime afterward, the brightness began to fall from many heads.
While I was finding room for the loot from Grandfather’s apartment, co-op fever struck my dilapidated home. Mr. Chips, as Pomander Walk called the former headmaster who defended himself against the safety committee from his campanile of flammable newspaper, became a hero when he hosed down shingles during a fire that started next door, deep inside a closed-up paint shop. The grapevine attributed it to the arson of a landlord anxious to see the property turn over.
The women once happy to plant begonias and tipple in the sun discovered the property was cute and worthy of shareholder maintenance payments. They who had regarded it as quaint that their Albanian caretaker owned two buildings in the Bronx suddenly marched around together in splenic black book committees. “Feeding pigeons, birds, or other animals from the windowsills, sidewalks, and yards is not allowed.” My air conditioner came in for criticism because it was secondhand and disrupted the uniformity of the façade.
A grounds committee circulated memos about preparing the property for conversion. This seemed to include discouraging loiterers. Every tactic short of driving spikes into the pavement and ripping out the steps was tried. We were charged with telling anyone we saw who didn’t belong to please move on.
The same woman was on my steps every day. She left whenever I came home or went out, no matter how often I asked her not to disturb herself. I tried to tell her the steps weren’t mine to give. She sat in her clothes like a bird in its covert. The first time, I surprised her. In a swift lowering of her eyelids, she shielded some precious memory as she rose. Her voice recalled the Old Country. “Beg pardon. Didn’t mean to bother your privateness.”
High Cotton: A Novel Page 26