Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  It was all totally pleasant, and Walker became a vast receptacle of sensation. Here was the country in which he was to remould his own decencies into a new form. Here was the shot in the arm, the new spring. Now they were sailing up the west side, past the piers; on one of them a helicopter buzzed like an angry bee. Behind the dark dirty sheds the expressway ran, with huge, shiny cars chasing back and forth. The high sharp top of the Chrysler building pointed up to a heaven also busy with aircraft. The tugs took them in on the last stretch, round the sharp curve into the dead water of the pier, where they joined the long line of vessels penned to the edge of the island. Inside the vast sheds foreign figures in bright jackets watched as the ship touched at the wharf-side and lodged its prow hard against the expressway. Hawsers were hooked, spectators waved, the gangplank went out, uniforms came aboard. America! He could see the taxicabs, yellow and big, swirling along the expressway, read the exhortations on the billboards, see along the cavernous streets that led into the centre of Manhattan. It was all heat and scurry, but there, promising. Sweat ran down inside Walker’s tweeds. The steward came along, sounding his chimes, and Walker made his way down below, through excited crowds of English persons jolted out of their national composure, to the dining room. The service seemed more haphazard even than usual, and at table Lady Hunt-Francis, her face flushed, was crying out, ‘We’re here, I understand! I’m sure it’s all a terrible mistake. Let’s stay on board and go back, all of us.’ Miss Marrow – Walker could think of his ugly duckling as no one else – took her place in the armchair next to Walker without looking at him; she looked down instead at the cloth, stained by five days of meals.

  She said, ‘I’ve used up all the film in my camera, taking shots of it all. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’

  He said, ‘An incredible city. A marvellous day.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink,’ said Miss Marrow.

  ‘I didn’t either, really,’ said Walker.

  ‘You’re too excited, my dear,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis, leaning across the table to his companion. ‘We may have to ask you to leave the table.’

  ‘Isn’t this luggage business awful?’ said Miss Marrow. ‘I went to the purser’s office and booked my trunks through to Pennsylvania Station by some awful trucking company and they charged me twenty dollars more. That’s seven pounds.’

  ‘Too much,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis. ‘Don’t pay it. They’re terrible people. Money-mad.’

  ‘You have to pay it,’ said Miss Marrow. ‘There’s no one else.’

  ‘Yes, terrible,’ said Dr Jochum, formal and firm as he used to be. ‘They are all cannibals in New York. But the rest of America, it is not like that.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Miss Marrow.

  ‘I hear the immigration people are the worst,’ said Walker.

  ‘I know,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis, ‘they undressed a friend of mine and took away her knickers. She never saw them again.’

  ‘I hope you have filled up your immigration certificates and have all your visas?’ said Dr Jochum, looking around anxiously for the steward who, affected by the new mood of excitement that poured, like the New York heat, through the ship, had become even more neglectful than usual. ‘It would be a pity if they did not let you into the country, now we have all come so far.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis. ‘Never fill up forms That’s a rule. One must have rules.’

  ‘That, unfortunately, is what they say too.’

  ‘My rules are better than their rules,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis, drawing hard on generations of living. ‘I shall just tell them who I am. I hear they dearly love a title.’

  ‘Give your forms to me,’ said Dr Jochum, ‘I vill fill them up for you. If you don’t have a rule about that.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis. ‘All one cares about is that one shouldn’t be known to have filled them in oneself.’

  ‘Also,’ said Dr Jochum, ‘they are very strict about plants and fruit. Did you know that when you drive into the state of California they take your oranges away?’

  ‘No!’ cried Miss Marrow.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Dr Jochum, ‘they are afraid of foreign pests, you see.’

  ‘That’s us,’ said Miss Marrow cheerfully.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Dr Jochum, and he leaned over in a jolly way toward’s Walker. ‘I’m afraid, my dear friend, they vill even confiscate your wife’s heather.’

  ‘The rotten devils,’ said Walker, equally cheerfully.

  And then, without even looking, he knew that something was happening to Miss Marrow, beside him. She rose up, a terrifying figure in her red box-pleated shorts, and said, quietly, in a hiss, ‘You’re married?’

  Walker turned russet and became afraid. He said nothing.

  ‘You were talking about honesty. Are you then? Are you?’

  ‘I suppose I am, really,’ he said, not looking up.

  ‘Honesty, decency,’ said Miss Marrow, turning in rage.

  ‘Mind, miss,’ said the steward; the bowl of porridge he was carrying left his grasp and came down, upturned, on Walker’s head. It sizzled on his pate; milk ran down his face in streams.

  ‘Christ!’ he said.

  ‘Serves you right,’ said Miss Marrow. Turning his head slightly, a painful motion, he saw through the veil of milk that Miss Marrow, arms threshing, was already striding through the dining room’s glass doors.

  Dr Jochum said, ‘That was very foolish of me.’

  ‘An accident,’ said the steward, wiping ineffectually at Walker’s thatch with a very dirty towel. ‘We don’t get a lot of those.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Bigears,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis. ‘Oh, Mr Bigears, I think I see it all. You’ve done a wicked thing, haven’t you?’

  ‘I fear he has,’ said Dr Jochum, handing Walker his napkin.

  The porridge began to settle round Walker’s neck. He applied the napkin to his red, furious skull and muttered sullenly, ‘Damn it all, damn it all!’ At surrounding tables conversation had stopped, faces had turned. ‘God knows I try to do my best,’ he said.

  ‘I should go and have a bath, Mr Bigears, before the bath-stewards go ashore. I hardly think it will come off like that.’

  ‘I fear she is right,’ said Dr Jochum, looking pained and helpless.

  A bath, the last straw, the final indignity with him, turned Walker completely sour. ‘That cheeky bitch,’ he said, foggy in a world of embarrassment and conspicuousness, knowing he was being unfair; he turned from the table.

  ‘Farewell,’ said Dr Jochum, coming forward to shake hands.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Bigears,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis, nodding regally, ‘and don’t forget to give the m-a-n his pennies. We must all do our bit for those less fortunate. I know. I’m one of them.’

  Walker, surly, dipped in his pocket and tipped the steward with the pound he had thoughtfully placed there for the purpose. ‘Have a drink with me,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the man, ‘been nice to have you here and listen to your conversation. Always interesting, you know. I hope the porridge comes out of the hair. Nasty sticky stuff, porridge is.’

  ‘It had better,’ said Walker.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the steward. ‘If you ask me, it’ll bring you and the young lady closer together, if anything.’

  The other breakfasters watched him as he went out of the room. Outside, heat buffeted through the public rooms and the ship had been transformed. Sweating in the hot air, Englishmen already stood in long lines, visas and X-ray photographs in their hands, waiting to go through the immigration in the first-class lounge. A day of queueing stood ahead of him, of treading on feet and suffering the trauma of not knowing whether America, for reasons best known to herself, would let him in. Churning, keening, Walker went down the steps towards his troglodyte’s cabin. Luggage now filled the passageways; new doors had opened here, old ones closed there; the crew seemed to have disappeared, all old safety gone. The public rooms were clo
sed, the balloons had gone from the bar. A bevy of longshoremen in lumberjackets, smoking stogies, stood around the corridors, bringing a new and fearful atmosphere. They stopped bundling trunks to look at him with open curiosity, for porridge streamed about him still. ‘Take a look a’ dis kook,’ said one in a plaid shirt. ‘Whadya tink? That kind guy dey ouh ta sen hem ride back to Yerrup wit a hart kick up du fanny.’ Walker pushed by, to search in the corridors near his cabin for the bath-steward he’d so assiduously avoided all the voyage. Another tip; that was the hardest blow of all. ‘You would pick this time,’ said the steward, running the salt-water bath. Walker undressed and got in, splashing his head with the special dish of fresh water. Outside, in New York, cars hooted, traffic roared, civilization buzzed; another life pressed his ears and penetrated his distress. He was no longer at sea: new conduct and new penalties operated now; inquisition and anguish lay ahead. Travel turned from peace to strife, the world from necessity to contingency. Beyond the bathroom the ship’s life was dissolving. And they were even going to take the heather, sprouting in his buttonhole, away.

  3

  AMERICA! There it lay, handy and tantalizing, all heat and scurry. All morning they had kept catching glimpses of it beyond the portholes as they stood in long lines, waiting to reach the tables where the immigration men in dacron shirts checked their visas, inspected the X-ray pictures of their lungs that they held in their hands, decided whether to admit them or not. Getting into America was, it seemed, quite as hard as getting into heaven; and the trouble was, thought Walker, standing rancid in the line of sweating aspirants, that as with heaven one couldn’t know whether one would like it when one got there. It was unconscionably hot; sweat trickled down their faces and their clothes stuck to their bodies. Outside, signs on buildings reported that the temperature and humidity were mounting steadily. Walker kept wiping his face and fanning himself with the negative of his chest, and from time to time he gave a nod to Miss Marrow, who was in the line some way ahead of him, in a green suit with a mohair collar, and with whom he was uneasily reconciled. She had come back to him for peace.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it served you right, but I didn’t mean to do it. Upset the porridge, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ said Walker, still minding. ‘It was rough justice, I suppose.’

  ‘Actually you must admit it was pretty funny.’

  ‘Oh yes, it was.’

  ‘I was terribly angry with you. But it’s hard to stay angry after that, even though you were such a sod. When I think what we nearly did. You might have said.’

  ‘It never really came up, somehow, and I didn’t think it made much difference.’

  ‘It made every difference, and you ought to know that. Still, you were very kind. I shan’t forget that. I hope you’ll write to me?’

  ‘If you want me to,’ said Walker. As she went back to her place in the queue, a big, chubby girl, the salt of the earth, Walker saw with interest that the hem of her skirt was unattached in at least three places, as if she had been attacked by dachshunds. The sight made him feel guilty; all his kindness and affection had been patronage, easy familiar emotion on the way to bigger game.

  The line moved slowly; it was nearly noon when he reached the immigration table. He handed across his X-ray. ‘Sorry, this ain’t right. You’ll have to wait there on that divan till we got this checked by a doctor.’ Halted! Walker groaned. A mad craving for America and his destiny, coupled with a profound sense of indignation and fear, swept through him as he stumbled to the divan to wait. My fates! he thought. Was he ill, must he go to hospital? Was he illegal, must he go to Ellis Island? Was he undesirable, must he go back ignominiously to England, perhaps working his passage? What we are denied we want, and Walker wanted America. Unspeakably hot, vilely smoky, the first-class lounge turned into a prison. Tantalizingly, outside, New York boomed and jostled, noise and heat and light. The cushions beneath him told lies about his comfort; he had none, none at all. And when at last the doctor came and released him (the scars were a technician’s thumbprint) he blessed the man, wished to call him friend, felt the spirit of victory. Unblemished by tuberculosis or syphilis, found tried and true, proven chaste, he passed ashore, down the gangplank and into the customs shed, smelling of hot wood.

  Here all was a bustle of people and trunks and suitcases. Walker found his own, deposited haphazardly on the dusty concrete floor. ‘Bring ’em over here, mac,’ said an excise man. ‘Okay, open ’em up, spread ’em around.’

  ‘You mean put the stuff on the floor?’ asked Walker.

  The customs man put his foot under the nearest suitcase, which Walker had just unlocked, and tipped it over. ‘Oh brother, you foreigners!’ he said, hoofing into Walker’s underwear with a heavy foot. ‘You brought anything you know you shouldn’ta?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker.

  ‘Don’t try to kid me, it won’t work.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Walker.

  ‘Okay, go, pack ’em up, get this stuff out of my way.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Walker, growing a little more jaundiced with the notion of absolute democracy, man speaking to man; but after he had picked his clothes out of the dusty concrete and restored them to his cases he felt a little better when he saw Lady Hunt-Francis was having a similar scene with three customs men.

  ‘Do be careful,’ she was saying, ‘the steward packed these cases with infinite care. I don’t want you to go disturbing them.’

  ‘Don’t mess me about, lady, open up,’ said one of the men.

  ‘Mind what you’re doing,’ said the old lady when the cases were open; the customs man said nothing, but picked up the contents of one in his thick hands and dropped them on the floor. Something broke. ‘Beast,’ said Lady Hunt-Francis, and as Walker went by with his porter he felt a moment of sympathy and shared nationality. It was England that they were maltreating.

  The longshoreman led him downstairs to where the taxis, yellow and green, milled about the entrance; amid the jumble of traffic stood Miss Marrow, looking as lonely as he felt. ‘Shall we share a cab?’ he said.

  ‘Oh good!’ said Miss Marrow.

  ‘That worth a buck to you?’ said the longshoreman, dropping his cases in the highway.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Walker.

  ‘Worth a dollar?’ asked the longshoreman.

  ‘I thought it was free,’ said Walker. The man was big, bulky and horny-handed, and Walker felt brave in saying so.

  ‘Whyncha stay home, tightwad?’ said the man.

  ‘Well, even if I had been going to give you a tip I wouldn’t now,’ said Walker.

  Miss Marrow said, ‘What a rude man.’

  The longshoreman heard this and stepping forward menacingly he pushed Walker hard over the heart with his big, horny hand. Though, as he hurtled backward, his lips were salty with fear, the one real thought that was in Walker’s mind was that of an enormous disappointment, the disappointment one has when one discovers that the reason why children are bad is because they have evil in their make-up. The disappointment boomed in his head as he landed upright with his back against something soft; it was Miss Marrow’s large receptive chest.

  ‘You sod,’ said Miss Marrow to the longshoreman.

  ‘Aw, leave me alone, lady,’ said the longshoreman, turning away.

  Violence was not a customary constituent of Walker’s view of the world, and it surprised him how quickly he could assimilate it. Already, as he regained his balance, it was normal with him. So this, then, was how people coped with the impossible, with death and war; coming into this frantic society, it all made total sense; only the feeling that he was a spectacle of utter stupidity made him feel really hard that it was happening to him, to no one else. Trembling, he went over to a yellow cab whose driver watched impassively, and asked him to take them both. The longshoreman shouted, ‘Don’t take the tightwad; he won’t give you a goddam cent.’

  The cabbie was as big and horny-handed as the longshoreman; Walker
was afraid they would never get away from all this. But he simply surveyed their two piles of baggage and said sceptically, ‘You wanna take all dat wid you?’ Walker found that a curious thing was happening; he was nervous of his own speech. Both his wishes and the accent he expressed them in seemed absurd, overly delicate, tea-party stuff; he said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  Not stirring from his driving seat, looking straight ahead, the man said, ‘Okay, let’s see how it goes.’ Walker tried to put on a tough walk as he went round the back and pulled on the lid of the boot. ‘Not in the trunk, bud,’ said the driver, leaning out and yelling.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Walker. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘What you can’t take wid you inside, you gotta take back in the terminal and express. Dat’s city law.’ Walker glanced over at the longshoreman, who stood bulky and hostile in the terminal entrance, spitting a good deal, and knew that going back inside was one thing that could never be, even if he had to burn his suitcases on the spot. ‘Okay, let’s move,’ said the cabbie, lighting a cigar with a book-match, and between them Miss Marrow and Walker strove manfully with the heavy luggage, finally getting it all into the passenger area and retaining a tiny intimate spot for themselves. ‘You just made it, don’t you?’ said the cabbie, turning around at last. ‘Where to?’ Walker gave the name of Miss Marrow’s hotel off Times Square, and his own in Brooklyn Heights. ‘You two not staying the same place?’ said the cabbie. ‘Come on, why not shack up together, make things easier for all of us. I don’t got to drive so far, you got fun. How’s that for a suggestion?’ He pushed in his gear lever and they swept under the expressway, over the cobbles and railtracks. ‘Whadya say, lady?’ They turned up one of the crosstown streets, past the unmistakable odour of the abattoir, toward the centre of the island. Dust and paper blew out of lidless garbage cans on the kerbside and iron fire-escapes staggered down the sides of ancient buildings, falling into decay. People sat on stoops, white, coloured. Sun glinted on windows, the city looked dark and hostile, and Walker felt defeated and confused, an animal without a soul, a dead thing. ‘No,’ said Miss Marrow, winking coyly at Walker. They passed vast skeletons of buildings in the process of construction, crossed the uptown avenues, thick with speeding traffic, joined a long jam of trucks and taxis. Men walked through the traffic with small barrows hung with dresses. Change and rebuilding showed on all sides.