Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “Oh, look at that cute little boy,” Aviva said bitterly. Frog Park, lunchtime, babies and herders of babies pastured in the sunshine. The boy was as strawberry blond as Julie had been once. He lounged against his mother with his toddler overalls unsnapped and flapping, feeding her a garbanzo bean. “Could you die?”

  The boy looked nothing like Julie had looked, apart from the hair. It was the angle of his slouch, the way he carelessly depended on his mother to hold him up, that killed her. Or maybe it was simply the avalanche of years. She looked away. She almost regretted having proposed to Nat that instead of eating at the store, they find someplace nice to sit and have an early lunch together. A bag of sandwiches from Genova Deli, some fried artichokes, a pair of Aranciatas. Her last meal, she had styled it, aiming for wry, hitting brittle. Taken aback when Nat only assented to her terminology, hunched over the counter of Brokeland, chin in hand, flying black sails from every mast like the ship in Greek mythology. Sailing as ever toward her, from yet another labyrinth, aboard the Moody Dude. No sign of Archy. Explanation of that absence, of what was wrong around or between the partners, awaited only a formal request from Aviva; but she had withheld it. For once, let Nat do the listening. Let him look for something to grab on to, someplace to hunker down and watch as she unstoppered a genie of panic and did whatever it was that you called the opposite of wishing.

  “If I go to prison,” she said.

  “Ho, boy,” Nat said, fishing Möbius strips of onion out of his sandwich with a feline prissiness, piling them on the white sandwich wrapper spread between them on the bench. “Here we go.”

  “You’re going to have to make Julie come visit me.”

  “Aviva.”

  “He won’t want to come,” Aviva said. “He’ll be too angry.”

  “You aren’t going to prison.”

  “Oh, no?”

  The boy reclined against his mother the way a god might recline in an Italian fresco, against a favorite cloud, in the heaven of his mother and her bare brown shoulder. Maybe around his eyes, too, there was a touch of Julie, a histamine puffiness in the cheeks.

  “Aviva, it’s a hearing in a hospital. Not a courtroom trial. And it’s about something that Gwen did. You’re just along for the ride.”

  “Gwen didn’t do anything, Nat.”

  “No, of course, I’m just saying—”

  “That’s the point. Gwen’s real mistake wasn’t mouthing off to a doc. I mean, it was a mistake. But she was tired. She was drained. It was a really long day. And the guy totally, totally provoked her.”

  “Had to be,” Nat said. “Gwen Shanks losing her cool is kind of hard to imagine.”

  “It was unreal. Impressive.” Delicious, sickening, like eating an entire birthday cake between them. Aviva had found herself reveling in Gwen’s outburst with all the horror of fifteen years spent putting up with the highhandedness and disdain of doctors, dusting it like dander from her shoulders. Fifteen years of valorous discretion, unspoken retorts, and trepverter. “But a mistake.”

  “It’s always a mistake to lose control like that,” Nat said without apparent self-irony.

  “Huh,” Aviva said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Anyway. This fucked-up hearing we have to endure today? It’s not happening because Gwen lost her shit in the ER. And Gwen’s blowup won’t be the reason when I have to go to prison.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she’s black. And look, I mean you’re aware of my policy when it comes to that type of situation.”

  “Your policy is ‘What do I know about being black?’ ”

  “What do I know about being black? I’m sure that when she went after him, calling him names, pointing her finger at him? To Lazar, it was just another stereotype from the ER deck of cards, you know, the Angry Black Woman. But being a black woman wasn’t Gwen’s big mistake, either. Her big mistake was being a midwife. A nurse-midwife who does home births and hospital births.”

  “They hate that.”

  “They hate all midwives, but they especially hate the ones who do home births. They want to make us go away. They want to say to us, ‘Pick. You can do births here in the hospital, or you can do them at home with your patchouli, and your placenta-eating, and your mandala tramp stamps. But if you choose to keep doing those home births, ladies? Then you lose your privileges.’ ”

  She became aware that some of the women around them, moms, babysitters, were looking to see who was ranting on this fine August afternoon at some poor old slumped guy in a pool-hall suit, picking at a sandwich. At least one of the moms was a patient of the Birth Partners, Dina or Deanna, looking half embarrassed and half entranced, the way you looked at your rabbi when you saw him mowing his lawn in a pair of Bermuda shorts.

  “I mean,” Aviva said, lowering her voice, “we know this. This is a proven, established fact. Every other hospital in the East Bay has already done it. Chimes is the last one that still lets midwives do both home and hospital births. They’re just looking for an excuse to go the same direction. And, of course, they have all the power, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Meanwhile, if they have a birth that goes like Lydia’s? It’s ‘Oh, hey, shit happens. Mom’s fine, baby’s fine, let’s move on.’ I don’t know, maybe if Gwen didn’t lose her temper, maybe we would have been able to skate past. But Gwen did lose her temper, and when it came time to say she was sorry for losing her temper, God bless her, she didn’t want to do that. So now? Today, at this hearing?”

  “What happens?”

  “I figure we’ll get our privileges suspended. A month, two months. Six months. Just to give us something to think about. And then two or six months from now, they’ll make it a condition of our reinstatement that we stop doing home births. Then once they’ve got me, they’ll make all the other midwives stop, too. And here’s the thing, Nat.”

  She put down her sandwich, wiped her fingers, took a long acrid swallow of orange soda. The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

  “I’m not going to stop,” Aviva said. “I will tell them I’m stopping, and then I will continue to do home births in secret. I’ll do them in yurts and tree forts, in Section Eight housing, on top of Grizzly Peak in some million-dollar glass palace, you can see the Dumbarton Bridge. And then one day, sooner or later, something will go wrong. I’ll have to transfer to the hospital. And the secret will get out. My privileges will be terminated. I’ll be investigated, and brought up for review, and after dragging the process out until our family is broke and in debt for all kinds of legal fees, the state medical board will take away my license.”

  She knew a strange sense of exhilaration and saw it reflected in her husband’s face, a question forming in his eyes, probably something along the lines of Is this what I’m like?

  “And after they take away my license, Nat, I promise you: I will still do home births. I will do them for people who live off the grid. Marginals. Illegals. People, I don’t know, moms on the run from the law. Moms in cults, moms living in communes. Whatever insane, highly inadvisable scenario you want to imagine where somebody would hire a rogue midwife. Because babies should be born at home, and midwives should catch them. That is the sum total of my system of belief, all right? It may seem trivial or quaint or crazy to you—”

  “When did I ever—”

  “—but I want you, okay, to take a minute—or, honestly, given the fact that we have been married for seventeen years, take two seconds and ask yourself if I would be willing to go to prison for that simple belief.”

  “No need to ask,” Nat said. “I’m going to start stocking up on files for the cakes.”

  She
smiled and punched him on the shoulder, hard, not without affection.

  “Ow.”

  “Asshole.”

  The genie had drained, a dark smoky funnel, back down into the mouth of its flask. She tamped the stopper and dropped the bottle into some deep irretrievable abyss where it belonged.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to vent.”

  “I get it.”

  “I had to say it to somebody.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.

  “That’s your job.”

  “Great,” he said. “Pretty soon I’ll be able to go full-time.”

  For the first time she caught the note of sorrow in his voice, something catching at the back of his throat.

  “Hey,” she said. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a fucking record store.”

  “This is sacred ground,” the old man was saying, or words to that effect. Titus, to be honest, was only half listening, or put it this way: He was listening as hard as he could but to a different story. A bigger story, The Titus Joyner Story as it culminated, for now at least, here. Here in the fluorescent chill of this funky old lost-Atlantis grotto of a body shop, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs having turned out to be a cabinet of wonders, the final resting place of Inca submarines and Nazi saucers and the death-ray cannons of ancient Egypt. Here where, from steel hooks along two of the cinder-block walls, there hung the bones, hides, and organs of legendary whips—grilles, slabs, chrome intricacies looted or preserved from dozens of monstrous automobiles. Here where, beside the long wall opposite the rolling steel doors, a Smithsonian of parts and hardware stood racked and labeled in bins, baskets, and pin drawers. Here. Now. Hiding out in the shadow of the AT-ATs on the ice world of Hoth. Co-conspiring in the secret lair of Cleon Strutter and Candygirl Clark to hit the vaults of his impregnable self and rob them of the treasure that he had been guarding for so long. With the whole of that guarded and time-locked heart, then, Titus was listening. Not to the science that Luther Stallings was dropping but to the mysterious story of his own life from this moment forward, a tangled tale of which the old man’s rambling lecture formed a mere strand in the overall weave. “Holy ground. Oakland, California. End of the dream. End of the motherfucking line.”

  “But not the end of the lecture,” said Valletta Moore, and under her breath, almost but not quite below the human hearing frequency, “Apparently.”

  She perched on a bar stool, hunched like a jeweler over an upturned steel drum that was covered in a cut sheet of glitter-flecked upholstery vinyl, in the “office” that had been carved out of the back corner of the echoey cinder-block barn by means of two grease-furred sofas, a wooden rolltop desk, and a filing cabinet, under a poster of a mad orange hot-rod pickup truck advertising something called the House of Kolor. Valletta had a white earbud tucked into the ear that was farthest from Luther, and the near one dangled as she leaned to study the little tools and bottles spread across the glittery tablecloth: Everything she needed to execute custom work on her fingernails. From time to time she lowered a pair of half-glasses from her forehead to the bridge of her nose but refused to keep them there for longer than a few seconds at a time. A veddy-dry British man droned from the speaker of the neglected earbud, narrating all about The Autobiography of Miss Jane Marple or some such shit. The submarine cave of Valletta Moore’s cleavage, glimpsed through the open collar of her shirt, a further, smaller Atlantis lost in freckles and rumors of cranberry lace, formed another vivid tangle in the tale of Titus Joyner.

  “Man has a audience,” said the old roly-poly Mexican or Spaniard or whatever he was. Owner of the place, Sixto Cantor. Mustached face made out of orange rocks seamed together like the Thing in the Fantastic Four, slung wide as the cars by which he got his living, thick white hair streamlined back into a swan, the fin on some heap of the Fonzie years. Across the name patch of his blue coverall, it said EDDIE in red script. Behind the prescription lenses of black safety glasses with cheese-grater sides, Eddie’s eyes patrolled like fighting fish in a tank. At least one of those eyes, at any given moment, was on the crew of six over in the first bay, three Latinos, two black guys, and a little punk-rock body-art dude, who were busy gutting some gray eighties box, maybe a Citation. Just feeding on the thing like a swarm of piranhas. “We gonna be here all night.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m talking about the nighttime,” the old man said. “So that’s okay. ‘History is made at night,’ Henry Ford said that. That is what they mean when they talk about the American Dream.”

  While he professed, Luther Stallings lay on the floor on his back, stripped to his white kung fu pajama pants, balanced at the tailbone on a foam rubber mat, snapping off stomach crunches by the hundred. Bicycle crunches, twisting crunches, rope climbs, the steady scissoring pulse of it marking the progress of a lecture interrupted only by an occasional wince as his hip bone cracked or by the odd snort of impatience from Valletta Moore. Every time Titus glanced over at Julie, boy was watching the ripple and swell of the old man’s abdominals, the play underneath that leather stitched tight as the rolls in a bucket seat. Julie looking half queasy, half hypnotized, as if watching a sneaker go around inside a clothes dryer. “Everything got started for us, minute the white man wanted to get some sleep on a train.”

  The discourse had been riding this particular local for most of the past fifteen, twenty minutes, The Secret History of the Black Man in California According to Luther Stallings, the old man backing up his claims with cites and quotes drawn from irrefutable authorities whose names always seemed to be on the verge of being divulged or else, when spoken aloud, meant nothing to Titus. Claim Number One, front and center, being something along the lines of how, when you tunneled deep, the way the old man had done during the long years of his exile, going way on down into the mines of knowledge, Oakland was literally the Land of Dreams. After that, well, between the growling and barking of the air compressor, the ceaselessness of the trash being talked by the Motor City crew, the sight of what appeared to be the right (i.e., Robin-side) door of the Batmobile from the old-school TV show hanging hooked like a side of beef in the far corner of the garage, and the undersea world whose gates parted every time Valletta Moore bent over to French the tip of another fingernail, frankly, Titus did not follow it too closely, though he understood and even felt prepared to endorse the view that the Secret History of the Black Man in California truly was all tied up with the sleep and sleeplessness, the insomnia and dreams of the white man. Because, because, hmm, something about how white folks back in the day, needing to catch their beauty sleep as they traveled west subjugating and conquering, turned to a man named Pullman. And this one white dude, Joe, no, George Pullman, turned right around and, not out of any kind of wanting to do the right thing but only because he was cheap and needed an instant pool of skilled but low-pay servants, started hiring up free black men of the time and setting them to work tending to the slumber of white people. Punctuated by grunts that at times seemed to elide or bleep out the parts of what he was saying that would help it make some kind of sense, the old man evoked the nightly scene, vigilant black men studying the sonorous nocturnal rumblings of wealthy sleepers in the sleeper cars, dreamers rocking through the great western darkness toward the land of sunset, the far shore of the American Dream, which for reasons no doubt made clear during a particularly loud grunt, was all because the word “America” was actually a broken-down version of “Amenthe-Ra,” the Land of the West in Ancient Egypt, where you went when you died, though not in a train, of course, but in a boat, a westbound boat like those that had freighted the sorrows of the Pullman porters’ African ancestors, even though to the ancient Egyptians, the death journey to Amenthe-Ra was only a kind of sleep, in fact a dream—not Dream as in “I Have a Dream” but, rather, the strange journey taken every night by the sleeping human brain, although, as an aside, the connections were interesting, you had to wonder why Dr. King, whose father was a Princ
e Hall Mason, had chosen to couch his message using a term so central to the Secret History of Black Men in California, the language of the Pullman porter, raised up and set to rights and liberated while the white man was literally asleep.

  “The freest black men that ever lived,” Luther Stallings told the boys, “but it was like a kind of secret freedom.”

  He described the Pullman porters in terms that conjured up giant sleek-haired warriors of the night, armored in smiles, how they went from place to place, all these little backwoods, boondocks towns, seeing the world, carrying like undercover spies, hidden about their persons, all the news of the clandestine world of black America, the latest records, gossip, magazines, hairstyles, spreading the lore and the styles across the country, to every place where black people lived, and most of all singing the song of California, to be specific the city of Oakland, where Pullman porters got off the trains to rest on their sunset couches in the houses they bought with the money they wrestled loose from Mr. George Pullman, houses in which they built up families that sent children and grandchildren to college and trade school and eventually to the United States Congress, then getting back onto the trains in the morning to ride south and east, spreading the news of their own prosperity, so that by the time World War II blew up, Oakland was the Hollywood of middle-class black aspiration, except that unlike in Hollywood, once you got to Oakland, you actually stood a chance of making good.

  “Hollywood,” Titus said, feeling like he was expected to say something. “Well, all right.”

  The Secret History came off kind of boring in its particulars, truthfully, built on events and details and historical phenomena whose obscurity to Titus only deepened as his grandfather strung them together: strikes and black labor unions, bourgeoisie and Seventh Street nightclubs, shipyards, the Klan marching down Broadway in broad daylight as white Oakland lined the streets cheering, and yet the arc of the narrative, the sense of sweep across time and territory, stirred, in Titus’s mind, a sense of revelation.