A Walker in the City Read online

  "Soon! Soon!"

  "Let us try again. What is it not books you like? La mer?"

  "Oui. J'aime la mer beaucoup."

  "J'aime beaucoup la mer. Encore."

  "J'aime beaucoup la mer."

  "Et puis?"

  "Les montagnes"

  "Et ensuite?"

  "I know what I want to say, but don't know how to say it."

  "Le cinéma? Le sport? Les jeunes filles? Les jeunes filles ne vous déplaisent pas, naturellement?"

  "Yes," I said. "I like some girls very much. But ... it's on the tip of my tongue..."

  "Pas en anglais!"

  "Well," I said, "I like summer."

  "Summer! And the other seasons?"

  "Le printemps, Tautomne, l'hiver?"

  "Combien font trois fois trois?"

  "Neuf."

  "Combien font quarante et vingt-six?"

  "Soixante-six."

  "Pourquoi préférez-vous l'été?"

  "La ... la chaud?" I gave it up. "The warmth ... the evenness."

  She stared at me silently, in gratitude. I distinctly heard her say: "I understand very well. I feel sympathy with your answer! I myself come from Odessa in the south of Russia. You know of Odessa? On the Black Sea. One of the most beautiful cities in all the world, full of sun. It is really a part of Greece. When I was a girl in Odessa, I would go down to the harbor every day and stare out across the water and imagine myself on a ship, a ship with blue sails, that would take me around the world."

  "You have lived in many places."

  "Oui. Nous avons habité des pays différents. La Russie, la France, l'Italie, la Palestine. Yes, many places."

  "Why did you come here?" I asked suddenly.

  She looked at me for a moment. I could not tell what she felt, or how much I had betrayed. But in some way my question wearied her. She rose, made a strange stiff little bow, and went out.

  Occasionally I saw her in the street. She made no effort to continue my practice in French, and I did not know how to ask. For a long time I did not see her at all. We knew that Mr. Solovey had gone bankrupt, and was looking for someone to buy the fixtures. There were rumors on the block that once, in the middle of the night, he had beaten her so violently that people in the other tenement had been awakened by her screams. But there was nothing definite we knew about them, and after many weeks in which I vainly looked for her everywhere and once tried to get into their apartment from the yard, I almost forgot her. The store was finally sold, and Mr. Solovey became an assistant in a drugstore on Blake Avenue. They continued to live in the apartment on the ground floor. One morning, while her children were at school, and her husband was at work, Mrs. Solovey sealed all the doors and windows with adhesive tape, and sat over the open gas jets in the kitchen until she was dead. It was raining the day they buried her. Because she was a suicide, the rabbi was reluctant to say the necessary prayers inside the synagogue. But they prevailed upon him to come out on the porch, and looking down on the hearse as it waited in the street, he intoned the service over her coffin. It was wrapped in the blue and white flag with a Star of David at the head. There were hundreds of women in their shawls, weeping in the rain. Most of them had never seen Mrs. Solovey, but they came to weep out of pity for her children, and out of terror and awe because someone was dead. My mother was in the front line outside the synagogue, and I needed urgently to see her. But the crowd was so large that I could not find her, and I waited in the back until the service was over.

  SUMMER: THE WAY TO HIGHLAND PARK

  SUMMER was the passage through. I remember first the long stone path next to a meadow in Prospect Park where as a child I ran off one summer twilight just in time to see the lamplighter go from lamp to lamp touching each gas mantle with the upraised end of a pole so that it suddenly flamed. On the other side of those lamps, the long meadow was stormy-green and dark; but along the path, the flames at each lamp flared in yellow and green petals. Then, that summer I first strayed off the block for myself, the stone steps leading up from the lake in Prospect Park had stalks of grass wound between their cracks, were white with dust and drops of salt I thought came from the peanuts whose smell was everywhere in the park. But there was also some sugary taste in the air that day like the glazed wrapper around the crackerjack box—and at the bottom of the box, caught by my sticky fingers, some fife or whistle which I blew that glorious warm Sunday full of cars from all over and the Stars and Stripes over the bandstand and the band in their colored coats and the dust flying up from everybody's shoes as we came over to hear.

  Summer was the great time. I think now with a special joy of those long afternoons of mildew and quietness in the school courtyard, now a lazy playground, and of the cool stored-up basketball sweat along the silence of the main hall, where the dust rose up brown as we played quoits against the principal's door. Then of those holidays even on weekdays when my mother would cry out as she suddenly wiped the sweat off her neck, "Oh, how hot it is today! Too hot! Too hot!" and decide on a day at Coney Island.

  It was this pause that gave me my first idea of summer: life could slow down. Walking with my mother to the Ell at the other end of Sutter Avenue, I would stop under the awning of the remnants store to watch the light falling through the holes in the buttons lining the window, and as we went past Belmont Avenue would stare in hungry pleasure at the fruits and vegetables on the open stands, the cherries glistening with damp as the storekeeper walked under his awning lightly passing a watering can over them; I would smell the sweat on the horses pulling the Italians' watermelon wagons—"Hey you ladies! Freschi and good!"; and breathe in the cloying sweetness of the caramels and chocolate syrup in the candy wholesaler's, the fumes of Turkish cigarettes from the "Odessa" and "Roumanian" tearooms, the strange sweetness from the splintered discarded crates where blotches of rotted fruit could still be seen crushed against the nailheads.

  It was from the El on its way to Coney Island that I caught my first full breath of the city in the open air. Groaning its way past a thousand old Brooklyn red fronts and tranquil awnings, that old train could never go slowly enough for me as I stood on the open platform between the cars, holding on to the gate. In the dead calm of noon, heat mists drifted around the rusty green spires of unknown churches; below, people seemed to kick their heels in the air just a moment before being swept from my sight. With each homey crash-crash crash-crash of the wheels against the rails, there would steal up at me along the bounding slopes of the awnings the nearness of all those streets in middle Brooklyn named after generals of the Revolutionary War. I tasted the sweetness of summer on every opening in my face. As we came back at night along the El again, the great reward of the long parched day, far better than any massed and arid beach, was the chance to stand up there between the cars, looking down on the quiet streets unrolling below me as we passed. The rusty iron cars ground against each other, protesting they might fall apart at each sharp turn. But in the steady crash-crash crash-crash there was a comforting homeward sound as the black cars rocked on the rails and more and more men and boys in open shirts came out on the platform fiercely breathing the wind-charged damp air. In the summer night the city had an easy unstitched look—people sat on the corner watching the flies buzz around the street lamps, or at bedroom windows openly yawning as they stared past us.

  Then home again, to the wet newsprint smell of the first editions of the News on the stands and the crackle of the hot dogs in the delicatessen windows—back to the old folks sitting outside our tenement on kitchen chairs, biting into polly seeds and drinking ice water out of milk bottles. Red and blue lights wink untiringly at us from the movie's long electric sign at the other end of Chester Street; the candy stores and delicatessens are ablaze. In the sky a blimp like a feebly smoking cigar floats in from some naval base along the coast. The dampness of the summer evening is in the last odors of all the suppers on the block, the salt in the air, the voices storming at each other behind the yellow window shades, the cries of the boys
racing each other around the block. In a moment of unbelievable quiet a girl across the way can be heard stickily trying note on note from Für Elise on an untuned box piano. The tones buzz against my grateful brain, gather themselves up into one swelling wave before they fall into the theme, then resume like a fly complaining its way up a windowpane. Silhouetted against the window shade in the hard burning whiteness of her kitchen, young Mrs. C., who does not know anyone is watching, stands stripped to the waist at the kitchen sink, washing herself down with yellow soap. Her long black hair trails down her back, and her breasts swell in the light, revealing the life hidden in their nakedness, soft as the heart of a fruit. On the rooftop over the hardware store the boys spring the pigeons from their cages, and against the wisps of smoke in the air colored by the movie sign the pigeons now begin their evening course—racing each other furiously in bobbing circles above their own roof, then widening and widening their flight from our roof to the water tank to the movie sign. Two blocks away, where the Italians begin at the other end of Rockaway Avenue, there is an aged sycamore with withered leaves. The pigeons go round this tree at every other flight, floating up and down as they urge their wings against the air. The flights now grow narrower and narrower each time the pigeons pass our roof; at the last round they alight quietly next to their own cages again, their wings flapping breathlessly against their sides, some diffident hoarse cry muffled in their throats as they are pressed back into their cages.

  Across the way a girl lies in bed, lazily scratching her legs as she reads the comics in the News. Her young brothers have been bedded in for the night on the fire escape, and wedged between the ladder and the railing, they now crouch in on themselves, their heads bent and their knees up to the chin, like children still in the womb. All along the block children are sleeping on the fire escapes. It is as hot tonight as it was this morning: first scorched, then damp. The thickness of the summer night weighs on us like wet wool. It is hard to breathe, to move. The old folks sit on their kitchen chairs in weary silence, cooling themselves with palmetto fans. The children on the fire escape giggle to each other as Negroes pass down the block on their way back to Livonia Avenue, singing aloud. One boy makes a feint at another, in playful attack. Suddenly a scream bursts out of the street: "Are you crazy? You'll fall to your death! Go to sleep or you'll be put back in the house!" It is near midnight, but no one can bear to go to bed. The rooms smell like burning sulphur. The heat stored up inside all through the day now oozes from the walls and blows its gritty breath on the faces of the sleepless people along the pavement. Hour by hour, the mounds of discarded polly seeds at each chair grow higher. The street is smeared with the blotched edges of ice-cream cones; every time I run around the block, the pavement clinks with empty coke bottles. By one o'clock whole families have gone to bed together on the roof, but the older boys sit on the edge, their feet dangling in the air. On the fire escapes the children hug each other for safety as they feel themselves falling asleep.

  Summer nights meant street meetings. One night there was even a sudden visitation of Negro Jews from Harlem, who came to Brownsville seeking us out. They raised their platform on our corner, and a gnarled, very tall old man with a long bony face stood on it for hours delivering a passionate address on the ties uniting all children of Israel. I remember how the cheekbones worked in his face and how the gray little Assyrian beard leaped into the air as he threw his arms out in entreaty. The crisp "American" eloquence of his speech bewildered me as I listened to him from the open window of that room, now mine, where our cousin had lived with us for so many years. Not a person on the block walked up to hear him; the old people sat cautiously in their usual places in front of the tenements, staring at him with wonder and suspicion, as if he were a barker calling them to enter his tent. Negroes were the shvartse, the blacks. We just did not think about them. They were people three and four blocks away you passed coming home from the subway. I never heard a word about them until the depression, when some of the younger ones began to do private painting jobs below the union wage scales, and when still another block of the earliest wooden shacks on Livonia Avenue near the subway's power station filled up with Negroes. Then some strange, embarrassed resentment would come out in the talk around the supper table. They were moving nearer and nearer. They were invading our neighborhood.

  But summer evenings that second year of the depression, when you went up Pitkin Avenue in the usual Friday evening procession to the corner of the savings bank, the young Communists seemed to talk only of our oppressed Negro brothers and of the Black Belt for Negroes alone they wanted to see in the South. The very way you pronounced Negro was a test of your political maturity. Communists came out with the word respectfully and warmly, and with a certain plain indignation held in readiness against those who might even think of saying anything else. The little band of young Socialists with whom I met Sunday evenings in the Labor Lyceum on Powell Street could never seem to say Negro with any particular emotion. And as the young Communists said sneeringly to us whenever they came around to break up a meeting and to argue us into joining them, we had no Negro comrades of our own.

  Sitting on the steps of the Labor Lyceum in that loneliest of all Sunday evenings that came after a Socialist meeting, I could still see high above the chill and dusty tile floors in the entrance the enormous head and thick beard of Karl Marx. The black ribbon of his spectacles lay across a frock coat that seemed to bulge with defiance, and his lapels still shone smooth in the old photograph under glass. Next to him a picture of our dear Gene Debs—his bald head glittering in the light of a single bulb hung over the hallway, his mouth fixed in a shy smile that made me ache to its distant goodness. "While there is a lower class I am of it, while there is a criminal class I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I cent not free." "Poor Parnell!" I would say under my breath. "My dead King!" Inside the Labor Lyceum there had been even on the hottest summer night that peculiarly stale chill up and down the hallway where I could see the dirt black between the tiles and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the creak of the folding chairs as the meeting droned on to the report of the educational director. But there on the steps, listening to the Communist hecklers through the ringing of the pinball machine and the malted milk frothing in the candy store next door, I pined for those long stale rooms where I had been safe and asleep with my own. Socialists were not deep; they laughed if you read too much; but they were wistful and good-humored and lazy; they told Yiddish jokes in the meeting; I had been of them all my life. They were one big Brownsville family that lived on nostalgic anecdotes of the great days before the Tammany Irishers had gerrymandered the district, when Brownsville had sent Socialists to the State Assembly and the Board of Aldermen. The local leaders were our benevolent uncles who had made good in the outside world as lawyers and dentists and teachers but would always stand up with us,

  No more tradition's chains shall bind us!

  Arise ye slaves! No more in thrall!

  to press us toward what Norman Thomas, with that clean hearty "American" ring to his voice, always called on such an earnest downsweep of his right arm the commonwealth of hand and brain.

  But the Communists who came after us Sunday evenings in the Labor Lyceum were not cozy at all. They were all somehow a little like Mendy, who was to go straight from Brownsville to Spain—tightly rolled together of surenes and contempt. I remember how the cold white tip of his nose shone in the light from the candy store next door, and how that cowlick that always seemed mysteriously to threaten me frothed over his eyes as, patronizing, icy and detached, he denounced the German Socialists who in 1914 had voted for the war credits, the English Socialists who in 1926 had sold out the General Strike, the Socialists everywhere who that summer of 1931 were selling out England, Germany, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  The keyword was always sellout. History had prepared as to expect great things of the future, but something or someone was always selling us out. "Bevin! Noske! Scheidemann! Hillquit! S
ellout after sellout after sellout!" Sellouts alone made it possible for us to talk together. What else would the Communist voice on the bank corner have talked about—the callousness of Herbert Hoover? the evictions that now took place on our block every day? the stupidity of the Tammany District leader, that "good Jew" who was Brooklyn's Commissioner of Records and could not read or write? You were a worker or a worker's son; you were poor; you were a Jew—it was more than enough. That voice on the bank corner knew our complaints through and through, wrapped itself around the elemental assent of each body in that crowd. No one really listened. There was life only at the back of the crowd, where it dribbled out into unwearied debates between individual Communists and Socialists. Sometimes the pressure of those arguments would reach around the speaker's stand, push it over, fill up the evening with the unquenchable bitterness between worker and worker. And then the real point of the evening would begin for me as I went round from circle to circle listening to the arguments. Long after midnight you could still see them up and down Pitkin Avenue—two inflamed faces holding the center, a great crowd around them adding to and tensely sharing in each new point made about Germany in 1914, Germany in 1919, England in 1926, Milwaukee in 1931.

  The way anywhere those summer evenings led through the rival meetings on Pitkin Avenue. I could always find people there. Socialism would come to banish my loneliness. Night after night now, going up Chester to Pitkin, I could not wait to get to the end of the street. The old beat-up boards of the synagogue porch looked frayed in the light, and the shammes sat on the steps desolately picking his nose as he frowned over the kids playing a last game of boxball in the gutter. From below the long glittering electric sign STADIUM ALWAYS A GOOD PICTURE AT THE STADIUM STADIUM the thick sweet fumes of deodorant out of the gents' were now stale and uninviting. Pitkin Avenue was already ablaze. From blocks away you could hear the Communist voice on the bank corner shouting into the great dark crowd, and some wistful Socialist voice on the opposite corner crying in rebuttal, and before you knew where you were, a sea of faces from Woolworth's to Kresge's had lifted you on its strong angry tide and had flung you against the gray marble wall of the savings bank. "WORKERS AND PEOPLE OF BROWNSVILLE...! HOW LONG WILL YOU...!"