by Daniel Klein
Herb’s sweeping idea is that if we could fully understand what it means to be human—everything about human consciousness that makes us unique in the animal kingdom—then we would live more fulfilling lives. And, incidentally, lives inspired by a generosity of spirit.
When Herb writes, ‘The state is the soul writ large’ on the board at the beginning of his first lecture, he always says, “Substitute ‘Grandville’ for ‘state’ and it means the same thing. Figure out what holds this ridiculous town together and we’ll find out what keeps our souls from shattering like shot glasses thrown against the Railroad Car’s wall on a Saturday night.”
The line always gets a laugh.
* * *
Wendell is sitting in the last pew of the AME Zion Church on Pleasant Street. It is the first time he has attended a Sunday morning church service in over fifty years and the only time he has ever been inside an African-American church. Next to him is Esther, and next to her are her two children, Kaela, who is ten, and Johnny, five. Johnny has Esther’s red hair and upturned nose, and Kaela is Chinese, a particular that Esther had never mentioned to Wendell. He met the children for the first time this morning and while the four of them walked from Board Street to Pleasant, Esther told the story of how she ended up going to Wuhan, China, to pick out and bring home her adopted daughter.
“Bob and I had been married for ten years and I just couldn’t conceive,” she said. “We went through the whole medical testing rigmarole but they couldn’t find anything, so we decided to adopt. And then when Kaela was four, bingo! I got pregnant.”
“I’ve heard of that one before—getting pregnant after you’ve adopted a child,” Wendell said.
“Me too, hundreds of times by now. One theory is that loving a baby gets your juices flowing—some hormone that’s needed for conception. So Kaela primed the pump for Johnny.”
“Lovely theory.”
“I like to think so. And so does Kaela.”
It is no surprise to Wendell that Esther’s daughter is in on all the biological details that account for her family’s composition: Esther is an irrepressible truth-teller. In any event, Kaela appears eminently well-adjusted, far more lighthearted than either Franny or Lila were at that age—or now, for that matter.
They took the back route to Pleasant Street, climbing onto the railroad embankment at the end of Board Street and walking from tie to tie along the tracks until they reached Methuan Road. Wendell had not walked these tracks since he was a teenager and it felt like an adventure. At one point Kaela, who was larking ahead, turned around and announced that they were all running away to join the circus. Wendell knew exactly what she was feeling.
At the end of Methuan, they turned back toward town, then turned again at the intersection with Pleasant. The clapboard church looked the same as it had when Wendell was a boy—a small, square structure that could easily be taken for an old one-room schoolhouse but for the sign in front: ‘A.M.E. Zion Church, founded 1862. All welcome.’
Wendell had called on the church’s pastor, Reverend Willa Jones, last Tuesday and told her what was on his mind. He asked if he could take a look at the church’s membership books, especially those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Wendell entered her home, Jones—a large woman, as big around as Wendell though a head shorter—remained standing. Although her flat face struck him as plain and stolid, her eyes were spellbinding in both their warmth and intensity, as befitting a clergywoman.
“How do you spell your name?” Jones asked.
“D-e-V-r-i-e-s.”
Jones had chuckled, then said, “Why don’t you come by my church this Sunday?”
Wendell resisted asking why. Or why she was not producing the church records for him to inspect. Reverend Jones obviously had something else in mind for him. So in the intervening days, he contented himself with reading more about Grandville’s blacks at the Historical Society—the first bunch who came as slaves and recent freemen, then the wave of escapees via the Underground Railroad, and finally, a few decades later, the small colony of Pullman Car porters, relatively well-off family men who collectively bought a parcel of land on Pleasant Street where they built identical, shingled, two-story domiciles on either side of the church. These were now run down and several were boarded up and empty, but a few still housed their descendants.
Reverend Jones slowly raises her upturned palms as if she is lifting open a window to let in a warm breeze, and the congregation stands to sing, “Wade In The Water.”
“Well, who are these children all dressed in red?
God’s a-gonna trouble the water
Must be the children that Moses led
God’s a-gonna trouble the water . . .”
Wendell and Esther sing along from the start, and Kaela picks up the melody by the second chorus and joins them while Johnny peers around, doing some serious nose picking. There are no more than twenty other people in the congregation and most of the faces are familiar to Wendell from town—from the Soup and Sandwich, the Post Office, the theater—although he has never seen a black face inside the Railroad Car, a realization that only now comes to him. Seeing all these Grandville blacks together affects Wendell in a way he never would have anticipated. Alone or in pairs on Main Street, they register effortlessly as part of the town, but as a group, they appear a people apart. He detects that difference in their faces; here, they look much more comfortable in their selves, more animated, and certainly more genial than when he encounters them in town. Undoubtedly, they hold back who they are and what they are capable of on Main Street, just the way they did two generations ago in James Baldwin’s book.
Who’s that young girl dressed in white?
Wade in the Water
Must be the Children of Israelites
God’s gonna trouble the Water.
Reverend Jones’s sermon is abstract and puzzling— something about baptism, redemption, and keeping up hope— but it is thankfully short. She leads them in a final hymn that is unknown to Wendell, “Wrestling Jacob,” and then announces the reception in the basement. Jones passes down the center aisle, shaking hands with every parishioner. When she comes to Wendell and his entourage, she shakes their hands too, then smiles at Wendell and says, “You all come down too.”
In the church’s fluorescent-lit basement, a long metal table is set with enough chicken legs, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, macaroni salad, collard greens, Jello, and sweet potato pie to feed the entire audience of the Phoenix on a Saturday night. Johnny instantly grabs himself a paper plate and gets in line, but Wendell, Esther, and Kaela hold back, feeling awkward— they did not know to bring food for the table.
Down here, Wendell nods to some of the parishioners he knows from town—Dan, from Guy’s Auto Parts; Martha, the seamstress at Balmot’s Cleaners; Winny, the groundskeeper at Sway Lodge. They all nod back and Winny even extends his hand for a quick shake, but it is obvious to Wendell that encountering him here causes a prompt, reflexive shift in their demeanor—a shift back to their Main Street persona. Wendell is unused to being an inhibiting presence—the last time he felt this way was at Sunday dinners at Sway Lodge when he was still married to Beatrice. It makes him want to leave as soon as possible.
“Here he is,” Reverend Jones says cheerily, walking up to Wendell with a cup of coffee in her hand. Behind her stands a light-skinned black couple near Wendell’s age. Both the man and the woman are white haired, and both are dressed in upscale Sunday clothes—at least, more upscale than anybody else’s in the room. Wendell had not spotted them in the chapel; perhaps they had been sitting in the front pew.
“Wendell deVries, I’d like you to meet William and Sharon deVries. These good people come up all the way from Connecticut to pray with us every Sunday.”
Wendell has to restrain himself from letting out a whoop of gladness—a ‘Hallelujah!’ would feel just right. He shakes William’s hand first, then Sharon’s.
“We appear to have something in common,” Wil
liam deVries says with a pleasant smile.
“We certainly do,” Wendell says. Without thinking, he reaches out to shake William’s hand again and William obliges him.
“My people are from here,” William says. “My father, his father, and his father before him. And before that, Mr. Henk deVries, a white man from Holland.”
“He was my great-great-grandfather’s brother,” Wendell says. Only two weeks ago he had ferreted out that piece of information from a family tree diagrammed on the inside cover of the deVries family Bible found on the top row of his bookshelf next to a 1918 atlas of the world.
“So that makes us cousins—far distant cousins, but cousins,” William says.
“I’ve missed you,” Wendell says. He has no idea what put these words in his mouth or quite what they mean, but he is not embarrassed by them, especially now that he sees William smile back at him.
“Do you have time to have lunch with us?” Esther asks.
Wendell realizes that he has not introduced her or Kaela— Johnny is off in the corner scarfing down sweet potato pie—so he does so now.
“We live nearby,” Esther says.
William and Sharon confer for a moment, then Sharon says, “That’s very kind of you. Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?”
“Not at all,” Wendell says, although he is as surprised by the invitation as they are.
They locate Reverend Jones again, make their goodbyes, mount the stairs, and exit the church onto Pleasant Street. Somewhere along the way, Wendell suggests to Esther that they go to his house because it is more roomy, and Esther says she will make a quick detour to the co-op to pick up food. Kaela and Johnny skip ahead, while the adults walk four-abreast, Wendell and Esther sandwiching their guests.
“Willa tells us you’ve been searching out your relatives,” William says. “Are you working on your genealogy?”
“I guess I am,” Wendell answers. “At least one part of it. My granddaughter learned in school that Grandville used to have some black deVrieses and it made quite an impression on us.”
“I can imagine,” William says. Unlike Professor Gnomes, William deVries does not appear to find anything wry or suspicious about either Wendell’s or his granddaughter’s curiosity.
“To tell you the truth, it makes me feel all kinds of things, Mr. deVries—”
“Bill,” William interjects.
“Okay, Bill. Probably the biggest thing it makes me feel is relieved,” Wendell goes on. “I’ve got a constitutional aversion to secrets. Been that way since I was a boy. So that’s part of it.”
“And the rest of it?” Sharon asks.
“I’m not sure,” Wendell replies. “I’m getting up there, you know? Getting closer to seventy than sixty. And some things I’ve never paid much attention to suddenly seem consequential, like—well, I guess you’d call it connectedness. I’ve got this itch to feel connected to as many things as I can. I never left Grandville—that might have something to do with it.”
“Well, Bill certainly did,” Sharon says. “Left when he was fourteen.”
“Closer to fifteen actually,” Bill says. “After my father took off and my mother died.”
“To go live with relatives?” Esther asks.
“No. Just to get a new start on my own.”
“But you were here until you were fifteen. Funny I don’t remember you from school,” Wendell says.
“I didn’t go to school here,” Bill says. “I went in Pittsfield. My mother drove me both ways.”
“Private school?”
“No, public. My mother made some kind of special arrangement. She didn’t want me to be the only black kid in school and they had a few like me over in Pittsfield.”
“Did you want to get out of Grandville? Is that why you left?” Esther asks.
“Yes,” Bill says.
“Prejudice?” Esther asks.
Bill smiled. “I guess so, although not the way you might think of it. Nobody burned any crosses in front of our house. I don’t even think I was called ‘nigger’ but once. It’s a subtle thing, but you can’t help but notice it. It just made it real hard for a boy to know who he was.”
“Except at Zion,” Sharon says.
Bill laughs softly. “That’s the truth. Back then there were only about ten people in the congregation, some of them coming from way out of the way, like Blandford and Montgomery. But it was the only time of the week when I felt like . . . well, you know, one of the gang.”
“That’s why he keeps coming back,” Sharon says.
After a moment, Esther says quietly, “I worry about that with my daughter.”
“She’s adopted, I figure,” Sharon says.
Esther nods. “From China. There aren’t any Chinese kids in the schools here either.”
Listening to all of this, Wendell feels both ignorant and inspired. And as the four of them follow the children onto Main Street, everything in town momentarily appears sharper to him than usual—the colors keener, the edges of things more treacherous. Congregants are flowing out of St. Peter’s Church clogging the sidewalk, and Wendell sees familiar faces all around him, many of them people he has known his entire life. Automatically, Wendell smiles, nods his head, and says, “How you doing?” but he quickens his step, shepherding his little flock through the host of white Christians.
“Well, lookee here.” It is Archie Morris, fresh from mass with his wife, Iris, and son, Flip. He is looking at Wendell and his group with his usual easy smile, yet this morning that smile makes Wendell feel less than easy. He ducks his head and walks on without greeting the Morrises.
A few steps later, Bill says, “Yup, it’s a subtle thing.”
Indeed, it is; Wendell nods silently. They are now passing the Onion Café where they can hear a jazz trio playing brunch background music and Bill comments on all the new restaurants in town since he was a kid.
“They’re for second-homers and retirees mostly,” Wendell says. “They get a country home with an authentic country kitchen and first thing they want to do is eat out.”
At the corner of Melville Street, Esther takes her son’s hand and heads down to the co-op, but Kaela insists on staying with the other adults. As they head up along the Melville Block, Bill says, “Did I say the Zion was the only place I felt at home here? Well, that’s not the whole truth. Here’s the other place.” He points at the Phoenix’s marquee.
“That’s my theater!” Wendell says, sounding very much like his teenage self boasting to his classmates at Grandville High.
“I know that.”
“You do?”
“Your father used to let my mother and me in free for the Saturday matinee.”
“Well, that was sure good of him, but it doesn’t sound much like my old man. That man counted every nickel.”
“He said it was because of our name,” Bill says, grinning. “Called it the deVries special discount.”
Wendell stops in his tracks. So his father knew about this family—probably knew they were distantly related too—but he had never said a word about them to Wendell or anyone else at home.
“Oh, he knew, all right,” Bill says, easily reading Wendell’s thoughts.
“So you must’ve known too,” Wendell says. There is some hurt in his voice that he did not anticipate and it is too late to disguise it.
“We certainly talked about looking you up, Wendell,” Sharon says. “But we weren’t sure that’s something you’d’ve welcomed.”
“That’s why we were so pleased when Willa phoned us,” Bill says.
Wendell feels so many things at once that all he can do is laugh. Bill joins in and as they pass by the window of Write Now, the two very distant cousins are lost together in giddy laughter. Inside, Franny is so busy handing out reserved copies of the Sunday Times and the Sunday Globe to her regular weekend customers that she does not see them.
“Mom says you have the key!” Kaela declares. She has skipped ahead and is now standing under the theater marquee, f
acing the adults with her hands on her hips.
“The keys to the kingdom!” Wendell says, fishing a ring of keys from his pants pocket and holding them up in front of him. “I think we’d better check it out, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, please!” the girl says.
And so in they all go to the old Phoenix Theater. Wendell snaps on the house lights. For several minutes, none of them speak. They are gaping at the Nile green ceiling with its Greek revival frescos of wooly-haired godheads blowing winds from the four corners of the world which, in here, are the four corners of the Phoenix Theater’s vaulted ceiling.
“My grandfather worked on that,” Bill says.
“The paintings?”
“No, just the plastering. He was proud of it, even if he never got to see it finished.”
“He died?”
“No,” Bill laughs. “This wasn’t a place a black man went to in those days.”
“Looks like it could use some plastering now,” Sharon says.
“That’s for certain,” Wendell says. “But it’s been a movie theater for so long nobody really notices. Truth is, I barely notice myself.”
“Mom says you live in a booth upstairs,” Kaela says.
“Just about. Do you want to see it?” Wendell starts for the stairs.
“Don’t you think your wife will be wondering where we are?” Sharon asks.
“Esther? Well, she’s not my wife, but you’re right. I’ll show you another time, Kaela.”
“Me too, I hope,” Bill says. “It’s every boy’s fantasy, you know. The secret hideout of all secret hideouts. The great control booth in the sky.”
Wendell laughs. “I’ll tell you, Bill, up there is the closest I ever get to feeling like I’ve got control of anything,” he says.