The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  Going back to the office, Max decided that he would write to Harry that afternoon. Enough, this being salty over what white folks said. Harry should have been bigger than that. Max walked into the office and pulled off his jacket. The windows were open and the heavy smell of the river came in. He sat down and loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. In the aisle behind him the copy boys and reporters brushed past with coffee and sandwiches. “Hey, Max,” some of them said, “going to Korea?” They had asked with laughter and Max laughed back. Then he sat down to write to Harry.

  It was no secret that Berg desperately wanted Max to go to Korea and see Harry Truman’s integrated Armed Forces take the field against the North Koreans. Berg had broached the idea in a roundabout way and Max had beat a rapid retreat. The joke in the office was, who in the hell was foolish enough to want to go out and possibly die for the Century? That was the way the white reporters put it in their discussions. Max could see a white reporter doing it, but not himself. It made no difference that Berg had said he could see a Pulitzer for Max; that the Negro fighting man for the first time in American journalism would be given credit at the moment he deserved it; Berg could see that too. But, Max thought, he could see Berg being beside himself with joy if circulation tripled in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant and Astoria as a result of the articles. Max used his operation as an out, but he knew that if the pot bubbled over in Korea, he’d have to tell Berg, no. Max assumed he would not have to do that. Berg had sense enough to know that any Negro really aware of his position in American society in the year 1950, if given the chance to refuse to go to a real fighting war and still remain economically and socially solvent, would refuse. Berg should know that, Max thought, Berg the cynical liberal (his own words). Besides, when the white Americans called out, “Gook!” it sounded awfully like nigger. Max had heard about that kind of war in the Pacific; he wanted none of it. But there was no reason why Korea would not turn into that kind of racial war. Instead of the British and French kicking the Orientals in the ass, now it was steady Uncle Sam. Ultimately there would be China to face. Racial wars called something else. The Russians understood the hell out of that. They carried the blood of the Khans and the Timurids. Thus tinged they were the least white of all the major Allies in War II—and suffered most. Could they forget Stalingrad, for example, where they lost more men than were lost by the Americans throughout the entire war? And the Japanese. If ever there came a chance to kick Sam’s ass, they wouldn’t pass it up. Sure, they were coming along fine, the Japanese, becoming Americanized and all that. But who could forget Little Boy peeled down the sky upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Military humiliations could be forgiven under a military code, but racial humiliations dealt under a military code never could be forgiven. Crazy, these wars.

  But there remained something haunting and curious about the chance to go to a war in which you yourself did not have to carry a gun or suffer in the foxholes; a war in which you were not the primary target counting off with every fearful stride the seven seconds it takes the enemy to get you in his sights and kill you. Given the chance, most men preferred war that way. It was true that correspondents were killed during wars, but those often were the ones who forgot, after all, that wars were only current news, that they were simply reporting the extensions of national policies foisted upon the shoulders of a poor pfc eating regularly for the first time in his life, or a second looey trying to wrest command from his sergeant. War II wasn’t quite five years dead and they were at it again, the French, the poor, stupid, losing French. Now they were in Vietnam, and losing their shirts. And Israel, surrounded by Arabs and the Mediterranean. How long would that last?

  The thought of Israel made him think of Bob Loewenstein; he had interviewed Bob the day before for a “Portrait” because he was donating the proceeds from his current show to Israel. There were some loose ends Max had to tie up. He ripped the letter to Harry from the typewriter, reread it and put it into an envelope which he addressed by hand. Wars, he thought, as he picked up the phone to call Bob, I want no part of wars. How can one write intelligently of an act that is basically stupid? Somebody would; lots of somebodies would, but I’m not going to be one of them.

  Then, he had believed that.

  Max glanced over his notes as he dialed. Bob was doing great. Making all the money and still had his art and it was not commercial. Bob hadn’t spoken about Regina, but Max knew that he (Max) wasn’t supposed to know about her. The meeting aboard the ship when Harry and Charlotte were leaving had been by chance, Bob would have him believe. Max hadn’t mentioned Regina either, of course. After, he had marveled at how easily one passes through the cuckoldry circus of Manhattan. If you choose to become involved in the games, you must honor the rules. Bob had had a hacking cough yesterday and had taken many cough drops along with a few martinis to ease a sore throat, but nothing seemed to help. When Bob got on the line Max would inquire about his cold, of course.

  “Hello.” Letitia, Max thought, Bob’s wife. The voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking in a great cathedral to no one in particular.

  “Max Reddick,” Max said, “How are you, Mrs. Loewenstein?” He’d never met her. He went on. “I’ve got a couple of questions to finish up with Bob. Is he there or at the gallery?”

  “Mr. Reddick? From the Century? Yes he told me. Mr. Reddick, Bob’s in the hospital.” Her voice now sounded very small and very hurt.

  “What’s happened?”

  There was a pause, then she said, “He came home late last night, went to sleep, but didn’t wake up this morning. He was in a coma. He’s still in a coma.”

  “What hospital?”

  She gave him the name of the hospital, but added, “You can’t see him. Just the family.”

  “Can I call you to find out what’s going on?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Reddick.”

  “Do they know what it is?”

  “They think it’s an aneurysm.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I’ve got to go now.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll call later.”

  Max pressed a button on the phone and got the “Portraits” editor. “Loewenstein is in the hospital with an aneurysm. Coma. Want to switch it to city desk?”

  “No. Not a big enough name. If he dies we’ll run the portrait with the copy we have. Hold it for now.”

  Max hung up. Should he call Regina or let her find out? If Bob had seen her, he probably told her about the “Portrait” and she would have asked which reporter on the Century was doing it. Max called her. She sounded very cheerful, having just come in from work and having seen Bob the night before, she told Max. And he thought, Oh, God. He imagined Regina, calmed and sated, perhaps combing her hair while she talked. Then he thought of Bob, lean and spare, as still as the death he was moving toward under an oxygen tent. For Regina, it had always been Bob, even when she was seeing him, Shea and the others. Always Bob with the blue eyes, the head that looked sort of squeezed in from the sides, the thin broken nose, the sandy hair. Bob with the hip phrases. “Yass, baby, how you doin’?”

  “How’s Bob’s portrait going?” Regina asked, slyly.

  Max had guessed right. “Baby, I got to talk to you,” he blurted. “Can I come over?”

  “‘Baby, I got to talk to you,’” she mocked him. “What’s the matter, horny?”

  “Naw, hell no,” Max said, suddenly wishing he were and that was all he had to see her about.

  Suddenly the cheerfulness was gone and in its place was a urgency. “What is it, Max?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  “No! What is it?” Regina’s voice was instantly demanding, startlingly harsh, as if some instinct had signaled her that a diaster had occurred.

  “When I see you,” Max said tensely.

  “Goddamn it, you’re not going to see me, Max! Now what is it? Is it about Bob?”

  Max was stung. “Later, Regina.”

  She crashed on, “What’s happened? Where’
s Bob? What’s this all about? Max, tell me!” Her voice was now a scream so loud that Max moved the phone away from his ear.

  “Bob’s in the hospital. In a coma, honey—”

  “Aw, no!”

  “Reg—”

  “When?”

  “Reg—”

  “When? Where?”

  “Reg, it was sudden. His wife couldn’t wake him this morning. She called the doctor and they took him to the hospital. He’s been there ever since. He’ll be all right.”

  “He’s not! He’s going to die!”

  Then Max saw it. She wanted him to die for the torment he had caused her, and this realization was tearing at her as brutally as the fact that he was dying.

  “He was with me last night,” Regina said. “We made love! He had a sore throat …” She wanted him to die and now he was dying. She had put that pussy on him and it killed him, finally. That weapon they have, the women. There was nothing else to do at the paper. Max left Regina’s number at the desk and took a taxi to her house.

  Regina cried at his side while he called the hospital and got a report. “Condition serious.” Well, it wasn’t critical yet, Max thought. But they lied to you. Nobody’s going to lie to me when my time comes, if I know it’s coming.

  [Now that I know, Max thought to himself in Leiden, I try lying to myself.]

  He held Regina in this arms. It was kind of stupid, that, but it was Man perhaps a million and three quarters of a thousand years old since Zinjanthropus sat around with his bereaved while they cried. Some people laughed and danced to keep from crying. Max remembered some of the wakes he had gone to as a very young man, when everyone came in with cake or potato salad or hams or fried chicken, barbecued spare ribs or cole slaw or macaroni salad, and whiskey. Then came the music and the slow drags and the Lindy Hops, the boogie woogies. The older people, they’d sing, “Didn’t He Ramble,” but maybe in the next room that corpse wasn’t going to ramble anymore.

  “It just can’t be!” Regina kept saying. Her love for Bob should have kept him strong and incapable of dying? Regina, he thought, we should be wise now. This is a time for setting precedents, you and I. We should be making love, stone screwing and drinking and playing records and screwing some more, and eating; it is a time for letting those who are going to die, die. But there is that weakness bred up in us. We must pause to mourn, reflect on dying. Except in war. Then you want to get away fast from the place where the dying is done.

  “No, no, no.” Regina sobbed, smashing her foot against the floor. Mad at God, Max thought. Mad at Jews who get themselves gassed and mad at the ones who escaped. Mad at Bob for not wanting her badly enough to throw out his wife and four kids, and now mad at him because he is dying and she had told him to his face (she was saying now, mucus and tears strewn through her hair) that she wished he were dead. Max led her to the bathroom and washed her face, dug the cloth into those deep, grief-carved creases that had suddenly lined her face. He opened her medicine cabinet and asked what pills she wanted to take. She gestured toward the blue-capsuled sodium amytal. “How many do you usually take?”

  “Two,” she said in her shattered voice.

  Max gave her three, then sat in her room while she undressed in the bathroom and readied for bed. Once he had known what it felt like to lie in her bed, to pad barefoot from the bathroom to the kitchen to put up coffee or to make a sandwich. She came out of the bathroom, her face bare of makeup, as if she had gone into mourning. She got into bed and let Max pull the covers up. “Call me if you need to,” Max said.

  “Thanks. Thank you, Max,” she said drowsily. He closed the door to the apartment and heard the lock snap behind him. He hoped she wouldn’t call in the middle of the night, but who else was she going to call? Could she say she was crying over a guy who was dying when he left her in bed? Could she tell anyone who the guy was? No. She would have to go back to the beginning, the way she had with Max. That would mean telling of trips when Bob, using business as an excuse, met her in the Catskills where they fished in a small lake at night and Bob tried to imitate the whippoorwill’s cry, or met her in the little hotel in Taxco where, with the sun setting, all the mountains of Mexico, harsh and grim during the day, turned soft, and the vultures on their last flights through the valleys had not seemed repulsive at all? Could she tell about meetings and bag lunches and long, arm-in-arm walks along the promenade of Carl Schurz Park? Could she tell of begging Bob to impregnate her and how, untrusting of her then, he had not seen her for three months?

  What Max hadn’t heard before, he heard that night and there had been so many times when, in genuine anger, he wanted to ask: Why, why, do you hurt yourself so? But he knew the answer and that made the question invalid. He called her the next morning, then called the hospital for another report. Condition: “Serious.” Still under oxygen, of course. Bob needed the oxygen to retard further damage to the brain. The sore throat he had complained of had been a broken vessel in his head, spurting a steady stream of blood against the back of his throat. Max reported to Regina, then dressed and took a taxi to her apartment and made her eat. The tears had not stopped and she had not slept. Twenty-four hours ago, Max thought, she had been her usual lovely self. Today, she looks ugly and a thousand years old. Could I have ever broken my neck to get into bed with this? Regina wanted to go to the hospital and Max became angry.

  “Don’t be a stupid broad all your life, Reg. What about his wife and kids? His sisters and brothers and his parents? What have you to do with any of that? All they need right now is you running in there screaming all over the place.”

  The tears, the body-shaking sobs, the forlorn body, sexless now, the gray eyes transformed into two wild, red balls, the brown hair like damp, stained straw. Max, watching her, thought, Those rotten little truths. He could almost hear them strike her, see her body recoil from them. He reached across to her and held her. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, thinking, World, look at this tableau. Look, world. We suckle your babies, clean your kitchens and shithouses, gave you all the blackertheberry your men ever wanted, take all the jobs you don’t want, fight in your wars and now you want us to stop short of loving and consoling your women too? “Try to call your office, Reg. Come on, now. When this is all over you won’t want to have lost your job. If it happens bad—” He paused. But some preparation was necessary. “—the job’ll be good to have. You’ll appreciate having something to do, some place to go.” He listened while she talked on the telephone. When she returned she said, “I suppose you have to go?”

  “Yes.”

  She started crying again, then silently, mouth pursed into a pout, until the scream burst from her trembling, tightened lips. “Oh, Max, what in the hell am I going to do?”

  Max remembered the endlessly long days after Lillian’s death; he remembered watching the sun come up and its light fill the room in which he slept, and he remembered the way it had eased down at the end of the day when the radios and voices, the slamming doors of the other apartments, jarred his being, made him think for the first time of the living. How had the fat couple on the second floor made love to each other? Was the tall, skinny, light-skinned woman on the first floor a good lover? Why did the guy beneath him laugh so much and so loudly? Much of the emptiness had remained, sometimes it hurt, at other times it merely ached. Remembering, Max took Regina in his arms and tucked her head onto his shoulder. His own eyes began to water and he held her tightly to him so that she might not spring free before he had a chance to blink the tears away.

  He left soon afterward and went wearily to the Century office where he spent the balance of the day plodding through work. He paused only to call the hospital and to call Regina, who now demanded that Max call Bob’s doctor and get an up-to-date prognosis. Max did not pass that along to Regina. The doctor did not hold out any hope whatsoever for Bob’s recovery. Just as well, Max thought. The brain’s going to jelly now, or parts of it. Better off dead. When Max was about to leave the office in the early evening, he calle
d Regina to tell her to dress so they could go out and eat. He called the hospital once again. Now it was, “Condition critical.”

  Max rang Regina’s doorbell and heard her inside running to open the door. “He’s dead!” she screamed into the empty hall.

  Max pushed her inside. “No, he’s not. I just called the hospital before I left the office. His condition’s critical, but he’s still alive.”

  “No, goddamn it, no. He is dead, I tell you, dead, dead, dead!”

  It was no good trying to reason with her. Max called the hospital and asked for Bob’s doctor again. He hung up slowly. Puzzled, he said aloud, “‘Why would they say ‘critical’ when he’s already dead?” Reg must have felt it and called. Max took her arm. “C’mon, we’re going to get something to eat.”

  “I don’t want to eat!” She tore away from him.

  Max sighed. “Reg, I’m very tired and you look pretty bad. Let’s eat; this’ll all wear a little better. After all, what can you do now?”

  She wiped her eyes. “All right, Max. I appreciate all this. I’ll try to be good, honest. But it’s so hard …” The tears again, then down the elevator, the hot night greeting them as they stepped into the street. She held him tightly as if she might lose him. She staggered against him sometimes and he would mutter, “Straighten up, baby, straighten up, Reg. That’s better.”

  He did not remember where they ate, but he remembered the walk back to her home. She held him tightly, as before, and bumped against him again. Her face chased grief and anger, anger and grief. Max heard her grinding her teeth; he caught the saw’s-teeth sound of the sobs she could not suppress, but she did not give way altogether until they were in the elevator. Upstairs he placed her on her bed and called her doctor, as she had asked. He handed her the phone and listened to her talking. She was asking the doctor to call the place where she usually went. “Will you help me pack a few things, Max? I know you’re tired, but I would appreciate it if you just dropped me off at the little hospital. I feel so tired, I’d be afraid to try, myself.”