by Ann Petry
She seemed to be waiting for him to say something but he couldn’t. He felt a curious kind of anger. He wanted to say, Well, what did you come back for? Do you know what you have just said, what you really said—
The girl said, “When I told you to turn around and you kept on driving I thought, What’ll I do, what’ll I do. When you finally stopped and parked the car, I thought the same thing, What’ll I do, what’ll I do? I can’t run any more. I can’t scream, there’s nothing left in me to scream with, there’s nothing left to fight him off with. I thought, No, impossible, a man with a voice like that couldn’t— Then when you drove the car back to Monmouth and got out, I felt relieved.
“Afterwards I began to be ashamed of myself, ashamed that I had thought, Yes, he’s a Negro but there isn’t anyone else to protect you and therefore he is good enough for that, ashamed of the whole thing. So I came back.”
“Because?”
“Because I wanted to thank you and I felt I owed you an explanation, an apology. And I wanted to know you better.”
“Know me better?”
“I thought we could be friends,” she said timidly.
“You came back here, to the dock, where you had been so badly frightened?”
“Of course I came back. I planned to keep on coming back until I found you here again. It was the fog that terrified me. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t see where I was going. There’s nothing here to frighten anyone on a clear night like this.”
You’re wrong there, honey, he thought, and this is a damn queer way to start a friendship. Friends. Ha!
“Friends, it is,” he said. “Shall we go drink beer in The Moonbeam to celebrate the Emancipation? Even though the sight of all those colored people left you limp?”
She looked so completely bewildered that he laughed and said, “Don’t try to figure it out. You’re much too beautiful to think. Leave us go wet our whistles.”
So once again they walked through Dumble Street, quiet now, Monday night quiet, wind from the river, smell of the river, clang-clang of trolley car in the distance, whine of siren somewhere, far off, faint, in the heart of the city, rumble of a truck on Franklin Avenue, lights still on in The Last Chance, the harsh redorange of the neon sign turning a patch of the sidewalk a paler redorange. He looked back at Number Six and saw a pink light upstairs where the Powthers lived, dimly, through the branches of The Hangman. No light downstairs where he and Abbie lived and had their being.
They turned into Franklin Avenue. “Say,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Camilo Williams.”
“Williams?” he said startled.
“Williams.”
That, he thought, I don’t believe. Camilo? Yes. Because it’s somehow right. Williams? No. You had it all made up, ready to hand, no, you didn’t, you handed it out quickly because you weren’t ready for that particular question at that particular moment, but you had to have a last name, at least folks do in most circles, so you grabbed at that one. You’ve probably forgotten that it’s my last name, too. For some reason your own last name, your real name, whatever it is, won’t do.
They were in front of The Moonbeam when she said, “Oh, look!” and pointed at a man who was kneeling on the sidewalk.
If the girl had not stopped to watch Cesar the Writing Man, Link would have walked past him, because he had seen him so many times, watched him so many times, that he knew his every motion, every change of expression. Cesar always bowed toward the East, making an obeisance that should have been ridiculous and wasn’t, then opened the cigar box, put on his glasses, and began writing on the sidewalk. He wrote with a kind of fury, pausing now and then to select a piece of colored chalk from the cigar box, adding the curlicues, the decorations, the little adornments to the capital letters as he went along.
And now Cesar glanced at them, glanced away, made his obeisance, and started writing on the sidewalk. Link wondered how he managed to look so clean when he always wore the same clothes—a heavy brown sweater, gray tweed knickers, dark gray golf hose. The bulk of the sweater, the blouse of the knickers suited his lean wiry build.
The girl stood back a little, as though she were watching an artist at work in oil or watercolor, and was respecting his right to the privacy necessary for the act of creation. She made no effort to read what he was writing until he had finished.
After Cesar removed his glasses, he arranged the blue and red and green chalk in the cigar box, closed the cover. He made another obeisance toward the East and somehow managed to look like a Mohammedan bowing toward Mecca. Then he was gone, walking down Franklin Avenue, with his lithe quick gait, the cigar box under his arm.
The girl leaned over and read what he had written on the sidewalk, reading it aloud: “Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. Ecclesiastes I:10.” She leaned over a little farther, studying the curlicues, the flourishes, and decorative lines that adorned the writing.
“What does it mean?” she asked. “Why did he write it?”
“Mean?” Link repeated. “Why I suppose it’s a kind of admonishment, a small sermon written on the sidewalk, for the benefit of anyone who stops to read it. He could have been describing The Moonbeam, saying that there have always been places like it and that there always will be. Or he may have been telling you or anyone else that no matter what your troubles or your worries or your pleasures or your delights may be, other people have experienced the same thing before and will again. As to why he wrote it—who knows? He’s been writing verses on the streets and sidewalks of Monmouth for years—Eastside, Westside, Uptown, Downtown. He calls himself Cesar the Writing Man.”
She said, softly, as though to herself, “It hath been already of old time, which was before us.”
Then they were standing inside the door of The Moonbeam. It was filled, even now, on a Monday night, with a goodsized crowd, filled as usual, every night, with the oversize bleat of the jukebox. In all these places, Link thought, they play the same song, a different record, and a different singer, and perhaps a different tune, but the same song about lost loves and old hates, violent love, blue violent love, the man gone, gone, gone, sung in a blurred fuzzy voice, not sung but moaned, pain in it, regret in it, a wail in it. The young men and the young women sitting at the tables, leaning against the long bar, looked as though they had been thinking about the man gone, the woman lost, remembering the old loves, the old hates, for the last hundred years.
While he stood there looking down the length of the big dimly lit room, he began to think about China and the smell of incense, about Bill Hod and China, about Bill Hod and Mamie Powther.
Bug Eyes approached them, hurrying, tray balanced on the palm of his hand, tray held high. He smiled at them, said, spontaneously, “I gotcha a nice table, this time, ’bout midway. Gotcha a nice table.”
It was, Link supposed, a nice table. The nearest arms and legs and ears were about three feet away. So they could talk, if they wanted to, without including six or seven others in the conversation. Whenever he looked at the girl, at the passionate lovely mouth, the deepset blue eyes, the arched eyebrows, the pale yellow hair that had a silky shimmer even in the dimly lit interior of The Moonbeam Café on Franklin Avenue, he was aware of a thickness in his throat that would have interfered with any words he might have said. What, he thought, does one say to a white female who has expressed horror at the thought of having laid her hand on the arm of a Negro? Her reaction to him, Link Williams, and “to all those colored people” had been exactly the same as her reaction to the repulsive creature who had chased her through the fog. Cat Jimmie on a cart equals terror, equals drowned-in-fear. All those colored people in a beer garden equals terror, equals drowned-in-fear. Link Williams, once one knows he is colored, also equals terror, equals drowned-in-fear. Equals friendship? Highly implausible. Come to think of it, what in hell h
ad she expected to find on the Dumble Street Dock, in a beer garden on Franklin Avenue? Polar bears, maybe? You see some of Jubine’s pictures somewhere, so you think you’ll find Old Man John the Barber and he will not look like a Negro, he will look like an etching by Rembrandt, and therefore all the colored people who live in this area will look like etchings by Rembrandt, only they don’t, they look like a whole mess of colored people, and they talk with their mouths, and they pour beer down their throats, and they move around, and their clothes look all wrong to you, and their voices sound all wrong to you and my voice was okay until you saw the color of the skin on my face, color of the skin on the outside of the throat from which the voice issued. Ha!
He ordered beer. She didn’t drink it. She looked at the glass that Bug Eyes placed in front of her, and then sat forward, leaning her elbows on the table.
She said, “Tell me what you do, where you’ve lived, and how. I want to know everything about you. Were you in the war?”
“In the Navy. Censor. Navy installation. Hawaii. I read all the guys’ letters. Read I love you, misspelled in all the known ways and some new and unknown ways, read I love you, figuratively blotted with tears, figuratively sticky with heart’s blood, literally stained with sweat. I read I can’t live without you, written the same way, and then—I love you, over and over again.”
She took her elbows off the table and sat up very straight.
“Did you like it?” she asked, voice even, voice a little constrained.
“You mean the Navy? Or the reading of another guy’s sweat and blood and tears spelled out in one-syllable words?”
“I mean the Navy.”
“Not especially. Good? Bad? It isn’t that simple. I know that for four years I sat on that damn island reading I love you, I love only you, I love you only, I will always love you. I don’t know whether I felt any way about it at all except that I hoped to hell we wouldn’t get blown to kingdom come early some morning. Sometimes I hoped that we’d get blown up just a little bit, to change the pace.” He grinned at her because each time he had said I love you, her back had got straighter until now she was sitting up just like Abbie or Queen Victoria.
“Do you like living in Monmouth?” she asked.
“Sure. I grew up here. I doubt that it would be possible to really and truly hate the place where you grew up unless something happened to you that destroyed your belief in yourself. And nothing much happened to me—I just grew up—pretty much like anybody else. With a couple of exceptions that may or may not have been average.”
He thought, All life goes in a circle, around and around, you started at one place, and then came right back to it again. “It hath been already of old time, which was before us.” In a way, his life had really started inside The Last Chance. So he was back there again, working as day man behind the bar, ten in the morning until six at night, right back where he started. And the girl? This girl, who at the sound of the words “I love you” repeated, and he had been repeating them purposely, had withdrawn, moved away, is she someone you have known before? No. He had never known anyone with quite so easy and natural a manner. There was something gay about her and something quite imperious. When he had wrung changes on all those different ways of saying I love you, her back had stiffened. Did he still believe that all cats bee gray? Well, yes. Well, no. This little one with her head lifted, chin up in the air, revealing the flawless throat, the long neck, ballerina’s neck, small hollow place at the base made for kissing, had revolt, refusal to submit, written in every line of her tautly held body. She was like a thoroughbred racehorse balking at the barrier. All cats bee gray? No.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“Do?”
“Do for a living.”
“Oh. I write about fashions. I go to all the openings and look at the new clothes. And write about them. I fly to Dallas and Chicago, to Paris and to London, and back to New York to look at all the new glitter that the fashion designers dream up.”
“Where do you live?”
“In New York most of the time. Sometimes in Chicago, sometimes in Montreal. Sometimes in London and in Paris and in Monmouth.”
New International Set, he thought. Pictures in Life magazine. French Riviera, Eden Roc, Hôtel du Cap, Ali Khan, Shah of Persia, Argentina millionaires. Maybe she’s an international tramp. He studied her face, No, impossible, even in this dim inadequate light, the eyes are too beautiful, too honest, the whole face too young, too pure, an absolutely vulnerable face, an expectant face. There’s something she isn’t telling and it’s making her uncomfortable but international tramps, no matter how beautiful they are, do not have this look of wonder, of expectancy, this eagerness in the eyes, in the mouth.
“Where were you born?”
“In Monmouth.”
“But you—did you grow up here?” Do you mean, he thought, that we’ve walked the same streets? You and I? Impossible. I would have seen you somewhere. If I had seen you only once, watched you cross a street only once, and never seen you again, I would have remembered it.
“Off and on—mostly off—”
He tried to picture her living in Monmouth, going to high school here, growing up in this small bustling city, and couldn’t. Perhaps Monmouth turned them out like this, but he didn’t believe it. Now as he looked at her, he thought that she might have been sitting in a drawing room, drinking tea, visiting over the teacups, she seemed so unaware of the noise, the blare of the jukebox, the smoke, the dim light, the people. He supposed it was the way she sat, her back so very straight, her head lifted, that made him think of Abbie. He had seen Abbie sitting midway in a crowded trolley car, talking to F. K. Jackson, and Abbie, too, gave the impression that she was in her own living room serving tea. Up until now he had thought this air of quiet elegance was an attribute of a handful of aristocratic old colored women and a handful of aristocratic old white women, thought too that it came only with age. Yet here was this girl with the same quality. It surprised him and puzzled him. And strangely enough, he found it delightful.
“Did you go to college?” he asked.
“Of course. I went to Barnard and loved it. I was good at it. So good at it that I was offered an instructorship in English once I got an M.A., preferably at Columbia.”
“Professor Williams,” he said and laughed. “That I can’t picture. I’m trying to picture the rest of it—but that—that’s funny.”
“No it isn’t,” she said sharply. “It was something that I did by myself with my own brain. Don’t laugh at me. I would have been good at it. I would have been somebody in my own right and instead—instead—”
“Instead?” he prompted.
She pushed the beer glass away from her as though she were not only rejecting beer but a whole way of life. “Well, I traipse around Paris twice a year thinking up new ways of saying that the skirts are longer or the skirts are shorter. The waistline is up or the waistline is down.” Then she stood up, and said, “I’m driving to New York tonight so I’ll have to get started.”
When he held the door of the car open for her he was still wondering what really came after the “instead”— Instead what? Obviously something more than fashion reporting had interfered with her being somebody in her own right.
He said, “When will I see you again?”
“Saturday? Here? Is that all right?”
“Not Saturday. Sunday. Late in the afternoon.”
“Fine,” she said.
“About five-thirty?”
“Fine, again.” She shook hands with him before she got in the car, and said, “I enjoyed myself.” And smiled. Then, for no reason at all that he could determine, she laughed—a bubbling joyous sound.
He watched her drive off, and frowned, thinking, She drives too fast. She zooms past those side streets as though she had a police escort in front of her, clearing the way. Then he stopped frowning, remembering w
hat her face was like when she laughed, the mouth curving with laughter, the eyes lighted, head thrown back, showing the long line of the throat. It’s not possible, not possible, but inevitable, he thought. There is nothing I can do to stop the process. I am falling in love with her. Not falling in love with her. I am in love with her. I have already, at the sight of that beautiful laughing face, once again, placed my trust, my belief, placed it irrevocably, in the hands of another human being. Hopelessly, inextricably involved. Again. For the third time. First there had been Abbie Crunch, and then Bill Hod, and now—a girl.
This time? This time? Would this girl with the laughing beautiful face, the long neck, the deepset eyes, would she, too, play some fantastic trick on him? “Such fantastic tricks as make the angels weep.”
He went in The Last Chance. Bill Hod was behind the bar. Alone.
“Friend,” Link said, “let us drink to the night.”
Bill stared at him, face expressionless, black obsidian eyes expressionless. He said slowly, “Sometimes I think you smoke reefers.”
“Even so, Comrade. Even so. Have a drink with me, anyway.”
“Okay. What’ll it be?”
“Whiskey and soda.”
Bill mixed the drinks quickly. Link watched his hands, deft hands, clean hands, hands with the nails carefully filed, hands that could hold a gun or a knife or a blackjack, hold anything, use anything, quickly, deftly. I bet when he’s a hundred and two he’ll look exactly the same, sound exactly the same, use his hands exactly the same. Indestructible.
Bill said, “What’re we supposed to be drinking to?”