Seeing them like this, in those bright colors, tidy and hopeful, was another blow. It did nothing to restore my dignity or make me feel more legitimate. Bent over the photograph, standing at Patricia’s bureau, I felt worse, more furtive and illicit than before. Holding this proof of their family in my hands, I felt my touch was profane, and that I held something sacred. This was an icon, a symbol of their life. There were things in their life that were closed to me, secret, that I would never know, that I would never understand, no matter how much Lewis told me. I stood without moving, holding my breath, minimizing my presence. Why was I here?
I looked into the mirror for reassurance, to remind myself that I existed, that my face was real. But it only made things worse. Here, in this mirror, I was boldly setting my features on the space meant to hold Patricia’s. My own face stared back at me, pink, alarmed, huge-eyed. The mascara had begun its inevitable treachery, and there were smudges below my eyes. My hair was messy, frizzy on top and in gauche hanks about my face. I looked like a study in chaos and guilt; they glowed around me like a halo.
In the hall, Lewis had been talking quietly to Samantha. Her answer now rose into a whine, high and irrational, nerve-racking.
“No, Daddy, no!” There was sobbing just beneath the words. “I want to sleep with you! I want to sleep in your room! Joyce isn’t here. I’m scared, Daddy!”
“Now, stop it,” Lewis said. He was getting angry, and his voice was stern. “Just stop this, Samantha.” His voice dropped again and began to recede: he was taking her back down the hall to her room. I remembered the dark hallway, the one light at the end.
I stepped closer to the door, listening. I wondered what they would do now. Maybe Lewis would tuck her carefully back into bed, turn on her light, sit down on her quilt, and read to her, his voice rising and falling until the monster in her room had vanished. I hoped he would do that. I hoped he knew that I wasn’t impatient. I thought of the little girl in the photograph, her straight dark eyebrows, her pale cheeks. I thought of her, frightened, trotting down the dark hallway in her thin cotton pajamas, her bare feet.
I turned away from the door. Take your time, I urged Lewis, don’t hurry. I moved to the window and pulled the chintz curtain aside. The street outside was deep in black shadows, and the rain had stopped. A police siren raised its officious wail in the distance. The curtain in my hand was heavy and soft, printed in deep red blowsy roses. I thought of Patricia choosing this material, of her proudly showing it to her husband and daughter. I thought of Samantha watching, adoring her mother’s face, admiring her mother’s choice. Patricia’s faith—in symmetry, convention—now seemed touching. And how could I criticize her? Why was I so scornful of her lack of imagination? Being conventional hadn’t saved her marriage, but being unconventional hadn’t saved mine. We were both divorced women; we had both failed at what we’d tried. I felt ashamed of my easy criticisms: her name, her curtains.
The door opened, sooner than I’d expected, and Lewis came back in.
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, and he shook his head unhappily. He said again, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all this. I’m back now.”
But he didn’t seem to be. He stood with his hands deep in his pockets, his face was distracted. I wondered if things had gone too wrong now for him to fix them. I wondered if the strain of all this—the whispering and hiding, the undignified mendacity, and now Samantha’s unexpected appearance and her rebelliousness—was too much for him, for us. I wondered if this had ruined our chance for tonight.
Lewis and I hadn’t felt these strains before. We had only seen each other alone. We’d only listened to each other, only watched each other’s eyes, only cared about each other’s thoughts. We had thought it was essential, but I could see now it had been a luxury. We had allowed ourselves to believe that what we saw in each other’s eyes was all there was. Now we had to look away from each other, we had to acknowledge the rest of the world.
I could see Lewis’s distress.
“Are you sure you still want me to stay?” I asked. “Maybe I should go. We can see each other tomorrow. It doesn’t matter about tonight.”
But it did matter to Lewis. He had planned this. He was determined that the things he planned would work the way he wanted. He doesn’t like change; I could see that if this didn’t work, it would count for him as a failure, his failure.
“I’m sure,” he said firmly. “I don’t want you to go home. Stay.” He pulled me into his arms again, and obediently I closed my eyes. When I felt his hand move across my back again, I moved beneath his hand, as though from passion, but passion had receded. My head was filled with thoughts, not feelings. I thought of Samantha in the dark hallway. I thought of her own room full of darkness and fear, monsters. I thought about the room around me, of Patricia’s careful, conscientious choices.
The voice came again. This time Samantha must have been standing right outside the door. Now she was awake, eager, hesitant.
“Daddy?” she whispered, hopeful. “Can I come in?”
Lewis lunged away from me at once.
“No!” he shouted. “I have already taken you to bed. Now go back to your room, Samantha, right now. Do you hear me?” Lewis waited, his face clenched. There was a silence: she had not left. “Samantha?” he repeated. She said nothing. “I want you to go right to bed, right this minute.” Silence. “Or I’m going to have to come out and spank you.”
Lewis’s voice rose angrily as he spoke. I closed my eyes. I could hear that he was desperate with frustration. He was going to force things to go right, he was going to bully them into going right. I knew he couldn’t; they had gone too wrong. There are things that can’t be forced, and children and passion are among them. I stood there listening, my eyes shut so as not to see his angry face, trying to think what I should do.
His last command was shouted at his daughter, and in the silence after it we heard her breath, a small broken one. She had begun to cry.
“Do you hear me, Samantha?” he said loudly, more distraught, furious.
Samantha couldn’t answer. She was really crying now, and a series of small despairing gusts emptied her small lungs.
I knew now what she looked like, and I could see her standing outside the door. I could see her thin shoulders hunched over, her arms crossed tightly across her chest, one bare foot covering the other, for warmth. The dark hall behind her. Her baby-sitter gone, her room full of monsters.
What I wanted to do was to push Lewis gently away from me and go to her myself. I wanted to stoop down and talk quietly to her, smoothing the hair back off her face. I wanted to take her by the hand and lead her back to her own room, turning on first the big overhead light and then the one by her bed. I wanted to pull the sheet down for her to climb in, and then to tuck it tightly up around her as she lay against the pillow. I wanted to sit down on the edge of her bed and read slowly to her, looking up from time to time, to see if she was sleepy yet. I wanted to sit there until she fell asleep, and then I wanted to tiptoe, myself, back down the hall to my own bedroom, my own warm bed, my own husband.
I wanted to reassure her, but of course I could not. That was the one thing it would be impossible for me to do. I wasn’t in this house as a mother, I was there as something else, something much less likeable. I had seen what I looked like, reflected in her mother’s mirror: my eyes smudged with black, my cheeks fiery, my hair lank and wild, like a nightmare.
White Boys in Their Teens
That summer, on Saturday evenings, I would show up at what Harlem called the hotel. It was not a hotel but a rooming house on a side street in White Plains. Long, feathery grass grew casually along the cracked sidewalk there, and the clapboard houses were painted unexpected colors: yellow with brown trim, or dark green with white.
At around nine o’clock I arrived at Harlem’s hotel and opened the wooden front door. There was no lobby, just a stairwell, and on each floor a narrow hall led fro
m front to back. The walls were plaster along one side, and exposed brick against the stairwell. Harlem’s room was on the third floor, and I went up the two flights at a quick, silent jog: I was climbing into another world.
Harlem’s door was the last on his hallway, which meant he had a window overlooking the backyard. I don’t know what the backyard looked like because I was never there in the daytime. Six days a week, Harlem and I were at work in the daytime, caddying at the Westchester Country Club. There were thirty-two caddies at the club, and most of them were like Harlem: black men in their forties and fifties. The rest were like me: white boys in their teens.
I knocked on Harlem’s door, and he answered from inside.
“Hold on,” he said. In a moment the door opened, and he stood in front of me. Harlem was my height, not tall, but massive, with a broad face and hooded eyes, a flat nose and a powerful jaw. His hair was fine and grizzled, gray beginning to spread through it like dust. He stood very straight, and when he saw me he gave me a slow half-smile.
“Billy, my man,” he said, and stepped back to let me in. He was wearing only his underwear: old clean white boxer shorts and a white cotton undershirt, its low scoop showing the arc of Harlem’s big chest, a furling of gray hairs in its center.
“Harlem,” I said, as if it were a password. I stepped inside.
“Okay, now,” Harlem said, shutting the door behind me. “So, Billy. We gone to have a good time tonight.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, and settled down on Harlem’s bed. This part of the evening was always the same: I sat on Harlem’s bed and watched him dress for the evening.
The room was small and simple. There was an iron bedstead, neatly made up with a red-striped bedspread, which was where I sat. There was a small table and chair, and a clothes cupboard with peeling veneer and a mirrored door. The bathroom was down the hall, and there was no closet. Harlem’s pants, sharp-creased and immaculate, hung upside down from the top of the clothes cupboard.
Harlem took his time getting dressed. He slid his arms deliberately into the sleeves of his clean white shirt; he shot his cuffs with dignity. Harlem’s moves were majestic; his body was rounded and solid, like a monumental sculpture. His huge chest extended downward into his muscular belly and swelled out from his trunk like the hard burl of a tree. As he dressed, Harlem checked himself from time to time in the mirror. The face he showed himself was closed and impassive.
When Harlem was finished he looked complete. His shirt was buttoned precisely up to his chin, his satiny tie, with its broad diagonal stripes, was knotted into a smooth triangle between the points of his collar. His narrow leather belt was buckled solidly underneath the noble belly. His socks were pale brown, and his shoes showed rich uneven striations from hard polishing.
Then Harlem turned and said, “One mo thing, Billy, fore we get on our way.”
The first time he said this I nodded, and waited to see what would happen next.
Harlem stepped unhurriedly out into the hall and moved a few steps away from his doorway. Standing before the unpainted wall, he pulled a brick out from its crumbly mortar. Behind this was a cavity, and from inside it Harlem took out a small paper bag, folded over on itself. He worked the brick neatly back into its slot, where it merged once more into the wall. Harlem stepped back into the room and shut the door behind him with composure.
I watched all this, respectful, mystified, thrilled. The concealed chamber, the hidden cache, the unexplained code of secrecy—all this was marvelous to me. That summer I was eighteen, and what I wanted was a world full of richness and excitement. I felt myself expanding, and I wanted to be surrounded by possibility, I wanted a world that would make me quicken. But it seemed as though all the grown-ups around me—my parents, the priests at school, everyone I knew—were insisting on a world that was relentlessly sober, airless, humdrum.
Harlem and his mystery offered me something altogether different: I felt I had climbed those wooden stairs into the Arabian Nights. It was as though Harlem had pulled aside a spangled curtain, revealing a vast and starry space, full of strange constellations. Anything might happen now, anything might come from out of that crumpled brown bag.
Harlem sat down beside me on the bed and unrolled the bag. Inside was a packet of fine white papers and a smaller bag of loose dry brown leaves, flaking and shredding to an insubstantial powder. Harlem rolled us a lean, bumpy cigarette with tightly furled ends, the frail paper twisted into tiny cornets. He held it up and looked at me.
“You know this stuff?” he asked, raising a heavy eyebrow.
“Yeah,” I said, not naming it: I was afraid I’d use the wrong word.
“This weed, Billy,” he said, taking a heavy metal lighter from the bedside table. “Make you feel good.”
I nodded again. To say that I knew the stuff was stretching the truth. I’d heard of it, but I had never seen it, and I knew no one who used it. In the late fifties, marijuana was not only against the law, it was dangerously against it, in a way that speeding, or using fake IDs to buy beer was not. Marijuana was something else altogether—serious, consequential. I would never have dared it alone, or with someone from my own world. But with Harlem I was in a different universe, larger, more expansive than my own, governed by another code. My throat narrowing, I watched him draw on the tiny cigarette, his eyes closing against the pungent smoke. I held out my hand, breathless with anticipation.
The Eagle Arms had a neon sign in the window that said steadily “Rheingold,” in deep pink letters against the dark interior. Inside was a long, narrow room, dark and smoky. There was always music playing in the background, a jazz saxophone, or an organ working its way slowly through the blues. On the right was an old wooden bar, with swiveling stools, and a mirror behind it. When Harlem and I came in the crowd was already there: Cash Money, The Crawl, Nighttime Paul, Eddie the Fish, Shirt Walter.
When we arrived, Harlem walked at speed down the length of the bar. He looked straight ahead, purposeful, as if he had an appointment with someone in the next room. At the far end he turned deliberately and stood for a moment, his hands on his hips, his jacket pulled back to expose the pointed end of his shiny tie. His head was tilted slightly, as though he was ready for a challenge. Not making one, but ready for one if it appeared.
Then Harlem turned and greeted the bartender.
“Shirt Walter,” he said formally, with a neat nod.
Shirt Walter was a solid, slow man in his fifties, with heavy eyes and a gray mustache. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. There was a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. Shirt Walter nodded back at Harlem, his hands busy.
“Evening, Harlem,” he said, and after I had been coming long enough, he began adding, “Billy.”
“Evening, Shirt Walter,” I said.
I liked Shirt Walter, as I liked most of the men at the Eagle. I liked the solid gleaming darkness of their skins, the deep bass of their voices, and especially I liked their laughs. At the country club, out on the golf course carrying the heavy bags and “making the loop” with the members, these men were distant and subdued. Here at the Eagle Arms they were living their real lives, and I could see them in all their powerful splendor. I felt that they had some dark and glowing secret. I couldn’t share it, but I felt its heat.
I liked being here with them. I liked the things they said and the things they did. Every Friday afternoon Cash Money took his paycheck and turned it into bills, which he brought in a fat, folded wad to the Eagle. That night he bought his friends drinks. He spent every single dollar in his pocket, and every Saturday morning he was dead flat broke. The rest of the week his friends bought him drinks. I never knew how he paid his rent.
I stood next to Harlem at the bar. He drank scotch and milk, and I drank Red Cap Ale. Nighttime Paul stood next to me. He was a tall, stringy man, jittery, with ashy-black skin and a bumpy nose. He liked to talk politics, and we were in an election year.
“That Nixon is a man don’t know how
to speak the trufe,” Paul announced to Shirt Walter.
Shirt Walter cocked his toothpick.
“Fact,” said Nighttime Paul, nodding. “Wouldn’t know how to let the trufe out if it swelled up inside him and boiled out his nose.”
“An you think Kennedy different,” said Cash Money, on the other side of Paul. Cash Money grinned derisively.
“You show me a politician tell the truth, I’ll vote for him,” Harlem announced. Harlem was older than the others, and his manner magisterial. He took a swallow of his drink; no one answered. I had nothing to say about politics; they seemed immeasurably distant from my life. At school, the priests never discussed them: we were meant to think only about our schoolwork and our immortal souls. At home, every night during the news I heard my father’s familiar and good-natured complaints over the way everyone handled everything. It seemed to me that politics went on and on and never changed. It seemed that other people took it all seriously, which meant I didn’t need to. I thought I would sometime, but not yet.
Down the bar there was a scuffle. Two men I didn’t know were jostling each other and laughing, loud, ebullient.
“I seen you with her, last week,” one of the men crowed. “I seen you, sneakin round.” He punched the other man on the shoulder. “I know twas you.”
The other man laughed, pleased. “Yeah, that was me,” he answered. “I seen her, once, twice.”
“Ahhh,” said the first man. “You sholy seen her. At least, you seen her.” More laughter, more jostling.
“What her name?” The first man jerked his chin up interrogatively.
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