A Walker in the City Read online

  Mr. Solovey was always abrupt and ill-tempered, and when he spoke at all, it was to throw a few words out from under his walrus mustache with an air of bitter disdain for us all. His whole manner as he stood behind his counter seemed to say: "I am here because I am here, and I may talk to you if I have to! Don't expect me to enjoy it!" His business declined steadily. Everyone else on the block was a little afraid of him, for he would look through a prescription with such surly impatience that rumors spread he was a careless and inefficient pharmacist, and probably unsafe to use. If he minded, he never showed it. There was always an open book on the counter, usually a Russian novel or a work of philosophy; he spent most of his time reading. He would sit in a greasy old wicker armchair beside the telephone booths, smoking Murads in a brown-stained celluloid holder and muttering to himself as he read. He took as little trouble to keep himself clean as he did his store, and his long drooping mustache and black alpaca coat were always gray with cigarette ash. It looked as if he hated to be roused from his reading even to make a sale, for the slightest complaint sent him into a rage. "I'll never come back to you, Mr. Solovey!" someone would threaten. "Thanks be to God!" he would shout back. "Thanks God! Thanks God! It will be a great pleasure not to see you!" "A meshúgener," the women on the block muttered to each other. "A real crazy one. Crazy to death."

  The Soloveys had chosen to live in Brownsville when they could have lived elsewhere, and this made them mysterious. Through some unfathomable act of will, they had chosen us. But for me they were beyond all our endless gossip and speculation about them. They fascinated me simply because they were so different. There was some open madness in the Soloveys' relation to each other for which I could find no parallel, not even a clue, in the lives of our own parents. Whenever I saw the strange couple together, the gold wedding ring on his left hand thick as hers, I felt they were still lovers. Yet the Soloveys were not rich. They were poor as we were, even poorer. I had never known anyone like them. They were weary people, strange and bereft people. I felt they had floated into Brownsville like wreckage off the ship of foreignness and "culture" and the great world outside. And there was that visible tie between them, that wedding ring even a man could wear, some deep consciousness of each other, that excited me, it seemed so illicit. And this was all the more remarkable because, though lovers, they were so obviously unhappy lovers. Had they chucked each other on the chin, had they kissed in public, they would have seemed merely idiotic. No, they seemed to hate each other, and could often be heard quarreling in their apartment, which sent every sound out into the hallway and the street. These quarrels were not like the ones we heard at home. There were no imprecations, no screams, no theatrical sobs: "You're killing me! You're plunging the knife straight into my heart! You're putting me into an early grave! May you sink ten fathoms into the earth!" Such bitter accusations were heard among us all the time, but did not mean even that someone disliked you. In Yiddish we broke all the windows to let a little air into the house.

  But in the Soloveys' quarrels there was something worse than anger; it was hopelessness. I felt such despair in them, such a fantastic need to confront each other alone all day long, that they puzzled me by not sharing their feelings with their children. They alone, the gruff ne'er-do-well husband and his elusive wife, were the family. Their two little girls did not seem to count at all; the lovers, though their love had been spent, still lived only for each other. And it was this that emphasized their strangeness for me—it was as strange as Mr. Solovey's books, as a Brownsville couple speaking Russian to each other, as strange as Mrs. Solovey's delightfully shocking blondness and the unfathomable despair that had brought them to us. In this severe dependence on each other for everything, there was a defiance of the family principle, of us, of their own poverty and apathy, that encouraged me to despise our values as crude and provincial. Only in movies and in The Sheik did people abandon the world for love, give themselves up to it—gladly. Yet there was nothing obviously immoral in the conduct of the Soloveys, nothing we could easily describe and condemn. It was merely that they were sufficient to each other; in their disappointment as in their love they were always alone. They left us out, they left Brownsville out; we were nothing to them. In the love despair of the Soloveys something seemed to say that our constant fight "to make sure" was childish, that we looked at life too narrowly, and that in any event, we did not count. Their loneliness went deeper than our solidarity.

  And so I loved them. By now I, too, wanted to defy Brownsville. I did not know where or how to begin. I knew only that I could dream all day long while pretending to be in the world, and that my mind was full of visions as intimate with me as loneliness. I felt I was alone, that there were things I had to endure out of loyalty but could never accept, and that whenever I liked, I could swim out from the Brownsville shore to that calm and sunlit sea beyond where great friends came up from the deep. Every book I read re-stocked my mind with those great friends who lived out of Brownsville. They came into my life proud and compassionate, recognizing me by a secret sign, whispering through subterranean channels of sympathy: "Alfred! Old boy! What have they done to you!" Walking about, I learned so well to live with them that I could not always tell whether it was they or I thinking in me. As each fresh excitement faded, I felt myself being flung down from great peaks. Sometimes I was not sure which character I was on my walks, there were so many in my head at once; or how I could explain one to the other; but after an afternoon's reading in the "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, I would walk past the pushcarts on Belmont Avenue and the market women crying "Oh you darlings! Oh you pretty ones! Come! Come! Eat us alive! Storm us! Devour us! Tear us apart!"—proud and alien as Othello, or dragging my clubfoot after me like the hero of Of Human Bondage, a book I had read to tatters in my amazement that Mr. W. Somerset Maugham knew me so well. In that daily walk from Glenmore to Pitkin to Belmont to Sutter I usually played out the life cycles of at least five imaginary characters. They did not stay in my mind very long, for I discovered new books every day; somewhere I felt them to be unreal, cut off by the sickening clean edge of the curb; but while they lived, they gave me a happiness that reverberated in my mind long after I had reached our street and had turned on the first worn step of our stoop for one last proud annihilating glance back at the block.

  The Soloveys came into my life as the nearest of all the great friends. Everything which made them seem queer on the block deepened their beauty for me. I yearned to spend the deepest part of myself on someone close, someone I could endow directly with the radiant life of the brotherhood I joined in books. Passionately attached as I was to my parents, it had never occurred to me to ask myself what I thought of them as individuals. They were the head of the great body to which I had been joined at birth. There was nothing I could give them. I wanted some voluntary and delighted gift of emotion to rise up in me; something that would surprise me in the giving, that would flame directly out of me; that was not, like the obedience of our family love, a routine affair of every day. I wanted to bestow love that came from an idea. All day long in our kitchen my mother and I loved each other in measures of tribulation well-worn as the Kol Nidre. We looked to each other for support; we recognized each other with & mutual sympathy and irritation; each of us bore some part of the other like a guarantee that the other would never die. I stammered, she used to say, because she stammered; when she was happy, the air on the block tasted new. I could never really take it in that there had been a time, even in der heym, when she had been simply a woman alone, with a life in which I had no part.

  Running around the block summer evenings, I always stopped in front of the Soloveys' windows and looked across the spiked iron fence above the cellar steps on the chance that I might see Mrs. Solovey moving around her kitchen. I still spent hours every afternoon hanging around the telephone; he simply refused to answer it; and sometimes I would sit in his greasy old wicker armchair outside the booths, excitedly taking in the large color picture of General Isr
ael Putnam on his horse riding up the stone steps just ahead of the British, the hard dots that stuck out of the black stippled wallpaper, the ladies dreaming in the brilliantine ads on the counter, the mothballs and camphor and brown paper wardrobes that always smelled of something deep, secret, inside. I liked to watch Mr. Solovey as he sat there reading behind his counter, perfectly indifferent to everyone, glowering and alone, the last wet brown inch of cigarette gripped so firmly between his teeth that I could never understand why the smoke did not get into his eyes or burn the edges of his mustache. It excited me just to watch someone read like that.

  But now, night after night as I lay on our kitchen chairs under the quilt, I found I could will some sudden picture of his wife, hospitable and grave in the darkness. Everything that now made her so lustrous to me—her air of not being quite placed in life, her gentle aloofness, her secret carnality—was missing in her husband's appearance. The store went from bad to worse, and he seemed to plant himself more and more in the back of it like a dead tree defying us to cut him down. He never even looked at me when I sat in his wicker armchair near the telephone booths, but barricaded himself behind his counter, where his Russian novels lay in a mound of dust and gradually displaced the brilliantine ads and the ten-cent toilet articles. Except in emergencies, or when I had someone to call to the telephone, hardly anyone now came into the store. Most people were afraid of him, and the boys on the block took a special delight in exasperating him by banging a handball just above his kitchen windows. Yet there was something indomitable in his bearing, and with it an ill-concealed contempt for us all, that made it impossible to feel sorry for him. His blazing eyes, his dirty alpaca jacket always powdered with a light dust of cigarette ash, the walrus mustache that drooped down the sides of his mouth with such an expression of disgust for us, for his life—everything seemed to say that he did not care how he lived or what we thought of him. Having determined to fail, his whole bearing told me he had chosen us to watch him; and he would fail just as he liked, shocking us as he went under, like a man drowning before our eyes whom our cries could not save. Perhaps he liked to shock us; perhaps our shame and incredulity at seeing him put back so far were things he viciously enjoyed, since the whole manner of his life was an assault on our own hopes and our plain sense of right and wrong. There was something positive in him that had chosen to die, that mocked all our admiration for success. We failed every day, but we fought our failure; we hated it; we measured every action by its help in getting us around failure. Mr. Solovey confused us. In some unspoken way, full of bitterness and scorn, he seemed to say that success did not matter.

  I alone knew his secret; I, too, was in love with his wife. I was perfectly sure that all his misery came from the force and bafflement of his attachment to her. The hopeless love between them had scoured them clean of normal concerns, like getting money and "making sure" and being parents. The store went to pieces, the two little girls in their foreign clothes played jacks all afternoon long on the front steps, Mr. Solovey denounced us with his eyes, and Mrs. Solovey walked among us in her dream of a better life. But alone, I used to think every time I passed their door on my way upstairs, they glided up and down in their apartment like two goldfish in the same tank. This was the way I saw them; she was the only key I had to their mystery. I based it entirely on my incredulous delight in her.

  It was her dreaminess, her air of not being quite related to anything around her, that pleased me most. She floated through our lives; in most ways she was never really with us. I saw her so seldom that afterward, whenever I summoned up her face a second before dropping off to sleep, I could never actually tell whether it was her face I remembered, or the face of another woman with blond hair who had once lived in our house. Under the quilt, all women with blond hair and gold wedding rings shining from behind the lattices of a summer house soon took on the same look as they comfortably placed one hand over my back, had the same wide-open dreamy smile as the women in the brilliantine ads on the counter. Only the name I had invented for Mrs. Solovey could bring her instantly back to me. I would say it over and over under my breath, just to hear the foreign syllables ring out—Elizavéta, Elizavéta, no name they ever gave a good Jewish woman; Elizaveta, Elizaveta, I was so astonished to think of Mrs. Solovey, a Jewish woman, speaking Russian every day; Elizaveta, Elizaveta, more accessible than any character I had ever found in a book, but as pliable; more real, but as deliciously unreal. There she was, only two flights of stairs below us, someone I might pass on the block every day, yet a woman like no other I had ever seen. Her blondness flashed out in our tenement, among our somber and dogged faces, with a smiling wantonness. Die blonde! Die blonde! In her blondness and languor I seemed to hear the comfortable rustle of nakedness itself.

  One day she came into our kitchen, looking for my mother to make a dress for her. I was alone, doing my French lesson at the table. When she spoke to me in her timid, Russian-gruff accent, I felt myself flying back to Anna Karenina. There was a grandeur of suffering in her face, in the spindly thinness of her body in the old-fashioned dress, that immediately sent me to that world I had heard of all my life. I was glad my mother was out; I felt I could now enjoy Mrs. Solovey alone. She stood at the kitchen door smiling uneasily, deliberating with herself whether to wait, and when I pressed her, timidly sat down on the other side of the table. I had made so much of her that seeing her so close gave me a curious feeling of alarm. How would it turn out? How did you address your shameful secret love when she walked into a kitchen, and sat down with you, and smiled, smiled nervously, never fitting herself to the great design? Looking at her there, I scorned her mean role as a wife and mother, held to the wildly unhappy husband below, to the two little girls who were always playing jacks by themselves on the front steps. She was Anna, Tolstoy's and my Anna, the sensual and kindly and aristocratically aloof heroine who was unhappily married, who bewitched men's minds, who shocked everyone in St. Petersburg by the gentle power that welled up despite her gold wedding ring. She might have just walked in from a frosty afternoon's ride with her lover on the Nevsky Prospekt, swathed in furs, a mink toque on her head, shyly impervious to the stares and whispers of the envious crowd.

  "You are perhaps going to school, young man?" Mrs. Solovey asked after a long silence.

  I nodded.

  "Do you, uh, do you like the going to school?"

  I sighed. She would understand.

  "Oh!" she said doubtfully. There was another long silence. Not knowing what else to do, I made a great show of studying my book.

  "What are you reading, young man, so serious young man?" she smiled.

  I turned the book around.

  Surprise and delight showed in her face. "You study French? You already perhaps speak it? I call it my other language! From the time I was a girl in Odessa I study it with application and pleasure. How pleasing to speak French with you as I wait for your mother! We can converse?"

  "Yes, Mrs. Solovey," I fumbled. "II ... il me ferait? Il me ferait très heureux."

  She laughed. "Ferait? Pas du tout! And you have not a suggestion of the true ac-cent!" Then I heard her say to me: "I suppose you are learning French only to read? The way you do everything! But that is a mistake, I can assure you! It is necessary to speak, to speak! Think how you would be happy to speak French well! To speak a foreign language is to depart from yourself. Do you not think it is tiresome to speak the same language all the time? Their language! To feel that you are in a kind of prison, where the words you speak every day are like the walls of your cell? To know with every word that you are the same, and no other, and that it is difficult to escape? But when I speak French to you I have the sensation that for a moment I have left, and I am happy."

  I saw her timidly smiling at me. "Come, young man, you will repeat your lesson to me?"

  I read the exercise slowly from the book. "Plus d'argent, donc plus d'amusement. N'importe; j'aime mieux ne pas m'amuser. Je n'ai dit mot à personne, et je n'en parlerai pas de
ma vie. Ni moi non plus."

  "Et vous?" she interrupted. "Comment vous appelezvous?"

  "Alfred."

  "Al-fred! Voilà un joli nom! Un nom anglais, n'est-ce pas? En connaissez-vous l'origine?"

  "What?"

  She sighed. "You know the origin of your name?"

  "Je pense ... pense ... un roi d'Angleterre?"

  "Bien sûr. Et la légende des petits gâteaux?"

  "What?"

  She tried again, very slowly.

  I shook my head.

  "But what is it they teach you in this American public school!"

  "We're not up to irregular verbs."

  "The old peasant woman, she asked the king to watch the çakes on the hearth. That they should not burn. But he thought and thought only of his poor country as he sat there, and he let them burn."

  "La vieille paysanne ... était ... était..."

  "Fâchée! Ex-cel-lent! She was very, very displeased. Que c'est facile! You must not stop now. Tell me something about yourself. Quel âge avez-vous?"

  "Quinze."

  "Vous avez quinze ans. My older girl, she is only nine. Maintenant, dites-moi: qu'est-ce que vous aimez le mieux au monde?"

  "J'aime ... j'aime..."

  "You have not understood me at all! I must be more careful to speak slowly. Quand-je-parle-comme-ceci-me-comprenez-vous?"

  "Oui."

  "Bien. Qu'est-ce que vous aimez le mieux au monde?"

  "Livres."

  "Les livres!" She laughed. "Quel genre de livres?"

  "Roman."

  "Le roman?"

  "Poésie."

  "La poésie!"

  "L'histoire. Les voyages."

  "Tout ça? Tout? Vous êtes un peu pédant."

  "What?"

  She sighed. "Does your mother come back very soon?"