“This is Granville Bryant. Max Reddick?”
Bryant, Max thought.
“Did I wake you?”
“Well …”
“I hear you’re looking for a job, Max. How’ve you been?”
“All right, except for the job.”
“You need a good publisher too.”
“Yeah,” Max said, laughing.
“Did I say something funny?”
“Oh, no. I’ve only been looking for a job since last winter. As for the publisher, ha-ha.”
“I know. It’s terrible.”
“You have a job, Granville?” Ah, well, it had to come to this, the fags. They had their games too.
“Well, yes, Max, but I wondered if you should take something that’ll keep you from your work.”
Their solicitousness kills me, Max thought. They could starve you and later say they were doing it so you could become proficient in your art. They’ve got all the answers, white folks. Well, Max, welcome to the round-eye set, the shitpacker crowd; maybe I can’t get out of this hole (ha-ha) until I make that route. “Granville, I need a job. Besides, the novel’s just about finished.”
“Oh! is it really? Splendid, Max! Are you pleased with it?”
No, Granville, it’s a rotten novel. I helped kill my girl because I wanted to write a rotten novel. I like ham hocks and beans and cabbage and collards for a daily diet, Granville, so I can write rotten books. But Max said, “Yes.”
“Well, then, a friend of mine is starting a new daily. He’s gathering staff now. It will be somewhat left, but you don’t mind that, do you? [And Max was thinking: How can a broke nigger mind anything?] He’s not interested in what a man’s color is. He’s read your work and the pieces you did for that Harlem paper and he’d like to see you, if you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“I’ll give you his number then. And say, you know Marion Dawes, don’t you?”
Dawes was the young Negro writer who’d gotten such a rave review in the Times. “I don’t know him,” Max said. “I know of him.” It was important to make the distinction.
“I see. I wondered if you’d be good enough to give me Harry’s address in Paris so I can give it to Marion—he was shy about calling you. Marion is planning to move to Paris before long and he’d like to get in touch with Harry.”
Max kept thinking, Harry ain’t gonna like this, ol’ Harry ain’t gonna like it at all.
“You know,” Bryant was saying, “Marion has gotten a fellowship, so he’ll be able to skimp through in Paris. But perhaps Harry will be able to help him with some contacts.”
“Sure,” Max said. Those bastards. They really looked after their own. “What kind of fellowship?”
“A Laurentian.”
“Nice,” Max said. “I wonder what I have to do to get one. They seem pretty hard for some people to come by.”
Bryant laughed. “It does take a little luck.”
And a little suck, Max thought. “That’s all, huh?”
Bryant laughed again. “As far as I know, Max. My! You do seem out of sorts. Really, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s all right,” Max said. “I’ve never been out of work nine months before. It upsets me a little.”
“Yes,” Bryant said. “I’m sorry for that. Max, I’d like to have lunch with you sometime. I know you don’t like me, but for a couple of hours—it won’t hurt will it?”
Max beat a retreat. “What do you mean, I don’t like you?”
“Come now. Both you and Harry. I know that.”
“It’s not that, Granville,” Max said weakly.
“Well, let’s talk about it another time. After you’ve spoken to Julian Berg. Remember,” Bryant said mockingly, “the lunch won’t hurt.”
“So all those liberal bastards couldn’t between them find a job for you, huh?” Julian Berg spoke as if he were musing to himself. He was a round little man with graying hair and light blue eyes. His nose was fiercely hooked as if to exaggerate his Jewishness. “I suppose this paper will be called liberal. That’s a pity, because from the position of the others, we have to be. Everybody on his dot, like dancers. Okay. We’ll take the label.” Berg grimaced. “So you won’t misunderstand. I want you on this paper because, number one, I want a Negro, as many as I can get. This is not pure altruism, Max. There’re whole segments of this town that have no voice. I’m concerned with Jews and Negroes. You can help me with Negroes and Jews and readers in general. Some Jews are reading the Times, the well-to-do. Too many Jews and Negroes are reading the reactionary press because they don’t know the difference in papers. There’s another view of things yet to be presented. That’s our job, that’s the New York Century. If you want the job, Cityside and specials, it’s yours.”
“I want it.”
It felt better, after all, having a job. Max resigned himself to it; he was pretty much like everyone else. No job, panic or depression or both swiftly followed. Truly middle class, he thought. I need to work. Perhaps with the publication of the next book he could stop working. In the pig’s rump.
He liked the way Berg was handling him. Max covered all kinds of human interest stories. The City Hall beat followed and, briefly, theater and books. Mostly it was Cityside, where he became familiar with the reporters of the other papers, the neat, young Times-men, always dark-suited and soft-spoken, cerebral. The Tribmen were cerebral without the dark suits and better drinkers. The reporters from the Mirror and the News seemed ashamed of themselves, while the men from the Journal and World-Telegram & Sun, constant, not quite plodders, drinkers in the old tradition, like French cabdrivers right after lunch with the hooch still curling around their mouths, were solid, underrated newsmen. Criterion reporters were not cerebral or good drinkers but pretended to be both. Max never was late and never missed an important news conference. The others, on a first-name basis with the whole range of public figures, were always late. But no matter, they could debrief Max Reddick of the Century, who was always on time. Handouts, follow-up calls and Max Reddick, and the story was covered, then written mentally in the nearest bar and given ten minutes on the typewriter at the office. Max didn’t quite know how to handle the situation. There were two alternatives, of course. He could refuse to float any more of his material (the juicy color and meat no reporter gave away anyhow) or he could continue as he was, hoping that, if ever he became bored or lazy or ill, then he might be able to debrief other reporters. Max chose the latter alternative through the months, picking up in the meantime plaques from the NAACP and the National Urban League and B’nai B’rith for “superior reporting,” but really for being a Negro reporter on a white Manhattan daily. They did not know how it had been the first few months, being stopped by guards and police and doormen, being refused entrance to press conferences until the Century office was called and his connection with it verified. Winter hit hard and was followed by a sullen spring, during which he thought of Lillian. He wondered now how it would have been with the writing. (He was riding the crest of anticipation. The new book would be out in early fall.) Would he have accomplished so much? On the other hand, wasn’t this job for her, for her memory? He had done it; he had secured the kind of job she believed he deserved. Aha, baby! I didn’t get it by deserving; I got it by knowing! Fags! (God, I must call Granville.)
If this book makes a nickel (he was still thinking) instead of buying a new car—zap! in the bank. Think France. Yes, think France. Six months, a year, it won’t hurt. See Harry, move around a little, see just what it is all these niggers are raving about.
The city seemed to give a heavy, concrete sigh of relief with the coming of September. Labor Day had passed. The department stores were filled with parents readying their broods for school and children bent on spending every penny their parents had not already spent on camp and trips to Grandma’s during the summer. The accidents on the road seemed to have been particularly gruesome over the Labor Day weekend; Max had covered three. But now the dead
were buried, the injured attached to splints, blood, dextrose and in hospital beds. Football was poised to replace baseball, and quite suddenly, Max thought of Regina. He had spoken to her last Christmas and had decided then that perhaps it would be better if he didn’t call her and if she didn’t call him. But Max was feeling gracious and expansive. Maybe he was ready to be friends with her now; ready to suffer lunches and dinners and long talks and going to movies and theater together—with nothing afterward. Max had never known a woman with whom he wanted that kind of relationship. Regina was different. He called her.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” she said. “I wondered how long it would take. Almost a year exactly, right?” What about last Christmas, Max wondered? He said nothing about it. “I’ve been reading you, of course,” she went on, “and I read your new book in galleys. I have a friend at your publisher.” It pleased Max to know that she had been thinking about him; he was glad he had called. “That’s your best book so far, Max. You should be proud of it, I am. But most important. Did you call because you’re feeling horny or are we friends? We are, aren’t we?”
“Honest Reg, this was just a friendly call. How are you? How’s Bob? Is it any better for you?”
“No, just the same. I think I’m getting used to it. Couldn’t we have dinner tonight? I’d like to see you and talk to you. It’s been a long time.”
“That’s just why I called,” Max lied, although he would not mind the dinner or seeing her again. He felt proud of himself. He hadn’t called because he wanted to get into her drawers (although he knew and she knew it too, that if she felt inclined to take them off for him he wouldn’t have said no). He couldn’t explain to himself his feeling for Regina. When she wanted to be friends why hadn’t he said, “It’s been nice, later?” Maybe she saw him coming, too. Regina Galbraith (formerly Goldberg) had been the sole member of her family spirited out of Nazi Germany. The rest were dead. Gassed and cooked, most likely. From what she’d told him, they were nice people, willing to please everyone, more German than Jewish. They would not have died in isolation, say, in an escape or during the murder of a prison guard. Those acts were in quarantine; they were not for those who needed the safety of a group. Regina went first to England and spent a few months in the London home of a mammoth, brusque woman. From there to Scotland. (Max had often pictured her, a small, puzzled child, still speaking High German, her head swiveling from side to side in order to see it all, her face a blank as her mind interpreted what the adults around her were saying by placing their words in a context with time of day, expressions on their faces, how loudly or softly they spoke.) She spent many years in Scotland and then was sent off to Australia. Years later, a young woman in her twenties, she arrived in the United States via San Francisco and thence to New York where she charmed everyone with her Scottish accent.
“How was the year for you, Regina?” he asked.
“I was tempted to call you Christmas. It was too much for me again.”
You did call, Max thought, sadly, and it would have been too much. Christmas, Chanukah, Bob in the bosom of his family (yours dead), Bob in someone else’s pants besides hers and his wife’s. Well, it was all a part of Regina’s thing, apologizing to hell and back for being alive with the rest of her family dead. The holidays were bad. Then (she had told him) she usually checked into a mental clinic, or friends did it for her, afraid of what she might do to herself after her ten-times-a-night calls.
“Hi, there! This is Regina Goldberg Galbraith. Oh, you know who this is. Well! Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! God, I feel so lonely. What are you doing tonight? I thought you might take a few moments out to talk to me. It’s good I have a friend like you to talk to when I feel this way. Where will you go Christmas? What will you do? Max [it was the call last Christmas] we are friends, right? You’d let me talk to you anytime if I needed someone to talk to, wouldn’t you? I’d let you talk to me anytime if you were a little ill. I mean, if we were very good friends, true friends. Last night, Max, I called a man, just to talk to. I was very ill.” (Max had not asked if it was Bob.) “He said he would come over and stay with me for a while. I said not to sleep with, I didn’t want to sleep with him, and he said yes, he understood and he came over and after a while we were on the rug, the red rug on my floor, and he made me go put in my diaphragm and we both got naked and he made love to me on the rug, oh, he fucked me and he fucked me in dirty places and I felt very dirty, dirty, Max, ohhhh, so dirty, and I thought he would stay with me after that, but he got up and left and I cried and cried, then I got up to look for my pills, but I must have hidden them from myself or—maybe he took them! Yes! He took them from the medicine chest! [Max listened and felt a chill creeping upward from the middle of his spine until it fuzzed somewhere in the front of his head.] Now I have no more pills!” She said the last, Max remembered, with a scream.
She had continued to scream and moan and Max had tried to calm her down. “Max! I need someone now! Come over, Max. I’ve no pills, what’ll I do, what’ll I do?”
“Whiskey,” Max had suggested. She dropped the phone. He could hear her drinking from a bottle. “Come talk to me, Max. I know you won’t do what he did.”
He couldn’t call Bob. Stay out of that mess. Besides, he would start wondering. She couldn’t either. Max had sat and listened, inserting a word here and there when he could. He knew he should have gone to be with her through the night. How well he knew that. But, suppose she continued screaming and moaning even if he were there, and finally the neighbors called the police. Sure, try and get out of that one. A half-naked girl (he assumed), out of her mind, her gray eyes bulging with fear and incomprehension, and a spade cat sitting there. Shit, he’d be in more trouble than she. No, he didn’t need that. He listened to her a long time, then he hung up without a goodbye.
It was after the New Year before he could think of her without a great deal of remorse. He had told himself over and over again that he hadn’t made the world; he just lived in it. He could have shown the cops his press card, but, so what? He was still a spade who was driving a nice young white girl to madness, they would think. And there was no certainty that Regina would not have led them on with her rantings.
But she had forgotten, or rather, she had not remembered the Christmas call. Max said, “I was away anyhow, Christmas. I was hoping it would be better for you. What about the Christmas coming?”
“Oh, don’t. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Okay, then, let’s arrange to meet for dinner,” he said, but he was thinking, A black man sorry for a white woman. A sucker for the people who hurt. Who’s a sucker for me? But then the world was gleefully crashing its way toward a kind of Jewishness. The war, the horrors of that war, had done it. Jewish comics were stomping out of the Catskills and clustering around the coaxial cables; they shot their biting, mother-geared humor across the land. Yiddish phrases were becoming national catchwords. The nation (and the world) was guilty about what had happened to the Jews in Germany. Therefore, we will take this Jewish thing and, finally, make it American. Forgive us for the delay, Sholem Asch and Henry Roth. Better late than never. And there was Regina. Who did what about her, bubi? The day after dinner with Regina (she told him that Bob was doing so well with his painting—he’d had two successful shows in two months—that he was thinking of buying a house in Manhattan, to her delight), Berg summoned Max to his office.
The Century (quite naturally, Max reflected now) was for Wallace. The defection of Southerners from the Democratic Party to form the Dixiecrats made the question of Truman’s election more than unlikely. Dewey looked like a shoo-in for the Presidency.
“We’re giving you Wallace headquarters in town,” Berg said. He seemed to be looking for a paper on his desk; he didn’t look at Max. He kept looking for the paper, but really, he was waiting. Max knew he was waiting. It was an important assignment. There were more experienced political writers on the paper. And Max also knew the assignment would entail the digging out of
Jews and Negroes high up in the Wallace hierarchy. Portraits, color. He said aloud, “Jews and Negroes, portraits, color.”
Berg stopped looking for his paper. He turned a dour eye on Max. “Oh, Max. Oh, Max. Say it with sincerity.” Berg broke into a sheepish grin. “Guess you know the paper pretty well by now.” He broke off the smile. “That’s exactly what we want, Jews, Negroes, portraits, color. If you can catch Wallace, we want to know about the abolition of the poll tax, enforcement of the statutes calling for the end of Jim Crow in interstate travel, the continuing apprehension and conviction of Nazi war criminals. We want to know if he’s going to expand the Marshall Plan or drop it as soon as he gets a chance. Okay?”
“Okay. And thanks.”
The Wallace people relied heavily on dramatics. Theirs was an uphill campaign. From the first it was not directed against Truman; Dewey was the target. Wallace, the thin man with the long face, the stiff, sweeping mop of hair, the toothy, embarrassed, adolescent grin, attracted young people—and, Max noted at the time, the younger veterans of the war. There was a certain vibrancy to the campaign, the kind only underdogs wage. Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, blacks and whites. There were spotlights in a thousand high school auditoriums that cut through the darkness with the speed and force of a knife wounding the eye to disclose Henry Agard Wallace.
The volunteers and staff people worked around the clock. Many nights Max left headquarters, leaving Regina behind with other volunteers who had come in from full-time jobs to ink the mimeograph machines and cut the stencils and run them off for the next day. But dramatics, spotlights, guitars and folk songs were not enough; nor were crowds of young people dancing in blue jeans. That was when blue jeans came to have their first bad connotation, because the people wearing them, the folk singers, brethren of the people and prebeatniks, were for Wallace. Long, long before Election Day the outcome was foreseen through that mysterious American device, the poll, the polls and talk; talk and the lack of money in the Progressive camp; the lack of money and the snowballing whisper campaign about the Communists flying high on the Wallace coattails. Tom Dewey’s star rose higher and higher. The Dixiecrats were going to hurt Truman, wound him mortally. Dewey all the way. The Gangbuster, the Governor. Truman? President by accident. Wallace? Even Roosevelt had kicked him out. Dewey all the way.
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 18