A Walker in the City Read online

  Sometimes we would walk up Pitkin Avenue with them after both meetings had collapsed under the storm of private arguments, ourselves still bitterly arguing each inch of the way. On the nights the Communists held "open meetings" in their headquarters on Thatford Avenue, they would lead us up endless staircases to a huge loft where the walls seemed to crackle with their tension and were lined round and round with long canvas red-painted strips crying DEFEND THE SOVIET UNION and FREE TOM MOONEY and THE SOCIALIST PARTY IS THE THIRD PARTY OF CAPITALISM. And often, after one of those regular Friday evening battles on Pitkin Avenue, I would meet up with them again on the benches in Betsy Head Park, where one night the local C.P. organizer told me that I could not join even if I wanted to, for I was a student, not a worker, and as we sat arguing France, Italy, Germany, and the British General Strike of 1926, I could hear the spiked shoes of a boy in the darkness below running round and round the track.

  It was to the sound of The Waste Land being read aloud that I met David. Whenever I got tired of flopping around the dusty streets and rang Isrolik's bell, the banister smelled of damp, the mother sat on a kitchen chair moaning against her unemployed husband as she stared at the sink, and from the city relief checks and cold family despair in that house Isrolik would start up with his glassy imperturbable poet's smile: "What an idiot! You still walking around in this heat? Come in and listen to Eliot! Everybody else is here!"

  They lived on the ground floor, in a perpetual sour smell from the backyard. Wherever you sat in that house, you saw the clotheslines in the yard. On the round table in the "dining room," Isrolik's study by day and a bedroom for the four younger children at night, lay the hallowed copy of The Waste Land that he carried around with him wherever he went, and his regular offering of Poetry, The New Masses, squares of chocolate Halvah, biscuit sandwiches filled with a soft vanilla cream beginning to run in the heat, and bottles of seltzer. Isrolik and I never took to each other, but he was the first boy I knew in Brownsville who cared for poetry, and who even wrote it. So despite all my uneasiness in his house, it always astonished and excited me to sit around that table with him and David and two or three other boys who would listen gravely, munching the biscuit sandwiches and drinking seltzer as Isrolik read aloud from The Waste Land, and then comment on the technic and the symbolism.

  I had never seen such boys before; I had not known they existed in Brownsville. There was one they privately called the hunchback, for his head was so enormous that it looked ready to fall of its own weight back on his spine. He was so ashamed that he never looked anyone in the face, and from time to time would mumble quotations he hoped someone would recognize and so begin to talk with him. Whenever we all went about in the evenings—to the Free Theater on East 27th Street to see Rosmersholm or Ghosts, to the Civic Repertory to see Eva Le Gallienne in Hedda Gabler, to Lincoln Terrace Park to pick up a girl—he walked behind us whispering lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol to see if we knew the next ones. There was another, his cheeks so pitted with acne that it was as if muddy wheels had passed over his face, who spoke every word with an Oxford accent. Whenever you sat next to him, you could hear each sharp intake of his breath like a hiss. There was still another, with a small growth of beard—they called him Ilyich, in honor of Lenin—a boy much older than the rest of us, a strange boy who lived by himself in a furnished room off Dumont Avenue, who had sworn never to shave until the boss class freed Tom Mooney. His long matted hair and beard gave him so archaic a look that I could never take it in that he was really there with me, talking in his gently condescending voice as I stared at the clotheslines. He seemed to be someone I had remembered from a book, or perhaps even from a dream, about Russian intellectuals sitting around a hut in Siberia early in the century.

  It was his feeling for poetry that held me to Isrolik's damp cluttered "study" those summer evenings. Wherever I looked, there were loose sheets of his own poems on the table, the floor, the beds, thrown in with stray issues of Poetry, commentaries on Eliot, and poems torn out of The New Masses. If Isrolik had to go into the kitchen to quiet his mother down, or to feed one of the children, or had to speak to us about anything not directly connected with poetry, he became irritable and impatient, tapped his feet and giggled nervously in his high thin voice until he could get back to reading from The Waste Land, a poem he loved with such breathless adoration that I seemed to see him sucking on each phrase like a lozenge he could not bear to swallow. Even when we tried to make money selling Eskimo Pies on the Coney Island beach, he would cry SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH as we thrashed our way through the sands.

  Yet in some way that puzzled me—I was so grateful to him for living two blocks away—I felt uneasy in his presence, and whenever I listened to him reading from The Waste Land to the sound of the mother moaning in the kitchen, I kept expecting a scream, a blow, perhaps even a fire, to bring things to a head in that house. How grim, sour and alone I felt as we walked around Brownsville those summer evenings arguing Keats and Shelley, Blake and Coleridge, Trotsky and Stalin. It was the second summer of the depression: my father had not worked for nine months, and every Friday evening as we sat down to eat my mother cried out: "Better I should work all night than we should take from the city!" Spain had a republic at last, and in England Ramsay MacDonald had just stabbed the Labor Party to the heart. I remember how we stopped in a school playground off Powell Street to play one last furious game of handball in the fading light; how, in front of a cutlery store on Belmont Avenue whose windows were ablaze with light, I stood looking at all those scissors and knives as Isrolik and his friends cried "Sellouts! Sellouts!" along my right ear. I felt that loneliness that shamed me after Socialist meetings on the steps of the Labor Lyceum—a loneliness I felt even in the massed and steaming "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, where all the future young lawyers sat at their law books with green eye-shades fixed over their faces like a second frown of attention; and in Lincoln Terrace Park, where old men played chess in the light from the street lamps. As we sat around all night arguing France, Germany, China, Italy, Spain, I hungrily listened to the girls squealing in the grass below.

  The best of that bunch was David. He was a chemist, but I understood him better than I did Isrolik. David loved Beethoven, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; he could always predict in advance the days on which Macy's would put Modern Library books up for thirty-eight cents; and though entirely devoted to chemistry and the Negro question and forever blinking at me uneasily from behind his thick glaring lenses, he would sit in our "dining room" every late Friday afternoon reading aloud in a clear voice the essays and poems and sketches I had written at the kitchen table that week, and from time to time say with a heartwarming smile: "That's good! That's a pretty good phrase! I really think you're improving!" Crowded summer nights in the "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, how good it was to run into David in the fiction section—just there, where Gogol's Summer Evenings on a Farm Near Dikánka seemed to me the most beautiful title I had ever seen—how good just to walk him home to East New York, singing themes from the Beethoven Violin Concerto as we went.

  It was poorer at his end than where we lived; most of the houses were the oldest tenements, with wooden staircases; when you went up the street bridge that led past the railroad yards, the streets looked as if they had cracked under the hot steam and the thunder from the freight cars being shuttled below. Along the route there were old tinsmith shops in basements, little unpainted wooden synagogues so old and bent and squeezed for space that you could see the boards loose in the walls; sweatshops where they made artificial flowers and ladies' slips until late in the evening. But I preferred it there; the nearer I got to David's house, the deeper I seemed to enter into Brownsville's frankness. Here was the other border, as far as possible from the alrightniks on Eastern Parkway; here was the turn-off for Highland Park, the transfer point to all good things that summer I was sixteen. The minute I went up the cracked and moldy wooden steps of David's house, my heart began to race against t
he thunder from the railroad yards. "Go over! Go over!"

  The thing I always saw first in David's dining room was the far wall solidly covered with newspaper pictures of lynchings, pickets being beaten up by the police, Ukrainian wheat fields from Soviet Russia Today, photographs, torn out of books, of Lenin, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick W. Douglass, Henri Barbusse, and Ernst Thaelmann. On the bureau next to his chemistry texts, ranged in front of the glass so that you saw their backs reflected in the glass whenever you looked at them, were the collected works of Lenin. On the wall above hung the usual oval photographs of the grandfather and grandmother, side by side staring down at me where I had nervously caught my shoes in the holes of the dark-brown linoleum. Whenever I looked away from those pictures on the far wall of Negroes hanging from the boughs of trees in the deep South, I would see those dead grandparents gloomily taking me in, and would feel that I had come up too close to some strange stone carving in the desert and had fallen between the cracks.

  On those hot summer evenings you could hear through the screens the endless charging of the freight cars in the yards. The mother, already yellow with cancer, sat silently and stiffly propped up on pillows; a young boy sat at her feet waving a palmetto fan, and whenever she cried out, would glare up at me fiercely and dash into the kitchen for another glass of water. In that house the light of the early summer evening had the same yellowness as the mother's face. She was small, with her hair oddly cut short like a boy's; and whenever I saw her, wore an old patched middy blouse; the yellowness of that room ran in sick querulous waves down into the bandages thick over her left breast. From the stale weedy garden patch in the old "private" house next door, the dusty prong of an old tree pressed against the window screen, and when the screen rattled in the sudden windy darkening of the air before a rainstorm, seemed to expel a thin layer of dust into the room.

  Everything in that house looked as if it had come down to a few minimum utensils for eating, sleeping, and dying. I remember the peculiar desolation of the broken dining room chairs around the table, and how, every time I moved, my shoes seemed to catch in the holes of the linoleum. Yet far more than the poverty in that orphaned and rotting house; more, even, than the sense of impending death, it was some deep, brave, and awful earnestness before life itself I always felt there. From time to time I would even catch in the air the curious, unbelievable idea that David had stripped their life deliberately to those chemistry textbooks, the collected works of Lenin, those Negroes on the far wall hanged, castrated, and burned in darkest Georgia. I had never seen such a naked house. And that it should be lived in so indifferently; that David should walk so carelessly across the hollows in the linoleum as he went over to the bureau to seize a fresh volume of Lenin that might purge me of my confusions and harden me up at last; that the mother herself, whether from interest or despair, should ignore everything there but our bitter arguments as she silently looked down at us—it was just this that kept me coming back. The house was so naked, everyone in it seemed entirely free to think.

  It was the lapping of the water against the wire fence I heard most below the sound of my voice when we went round and round the old reservoir. Those still, perfectly hot afternoons, Highland Park was so quiet, you could hear children talking to each other in the empty bandstand below, the drip of the water fountains down in the park, a girl laughing at the other end of the path around the reservoir. The reservoir rose at the very top of a hill; the hill overlooked the last of Brooklyn, the thousands of tombstones in the great cemeteries just beyond, distant windows blinking in the skyscrapers white in the sun over midtown Manhattan. But no one ever seemed to go to Highland Park much; the reservoir itself, they said, had not been used for years. Even in the middle of a June afternoon, the graveled path around it was so quiet, I could hear the water lapping against the wire fence.

  We used to go round and round it, reading in turns all I had suddenly begun to write that year. It was the summer of my graduation from high school, the beginning of that cardinal summer at sixteen when, day after day, wild with gratitude and surprise, I began to take in what I would live for. He must have been a very young man then, not long out of the city college to which I in my turn would be going that fall; but very offhand, forever drawling out sarcasms when he thought I needed taking down, he seemed to me very settled and wise in that thin, weary way he had; he never paid a compliment to your face. Every warm full June afternoon that last week of high school, I would wait for him on Evergreen Avenue, staring and staring at the trees lining the quiet "American" streets beautiful with gray frame houses and brownstones, and then we would walk past the German ice-cream parlors and up Bushwick Avenue in that extraordinary summer's peace under the awnings, stop at his house to hear Kreisler and Casals, and at last, steadily mounting the hill that led into Highland Park past Trommer's Brewery, go up to the reservoir through the cemetery, in which he once pointed out the place where a little group of Chinese lay all to themselves.

  It always astonished me that he took so much trouble; he had never been a teacher of mine. But that last week, proctoring our final examination in Spanish, he had refused me permission to leave the room when I had turned in my papers before the closing bell, and when I had asked for something to read, he had flung me some more yellow test paper, and in his weary unamiable way, had said: "I suppose you can write? Write something!"

  It had been about a violin. Walking along the street I had seen an old violin in a pawnshop window. It was snowing; people walked on every side of me, huddled against the storm; but I stood in front of that despised and neglected violin, remembering all the hands through which it had passed. I had shown it to him then and there, and he had read it with a grin; and still grinning, had taken me off to lunch; and that thin, weary, bitter grin more and more pronounced each day of that last week I ever saw him, he would lend me autobiographies by Russian Jews, picture books by Marc Chagall, and leading me off to Highland Park for a walk around the reservoir, make me read aloud from my notebook essays and poems and sketches.

  Those June afternoons, it was the water lapping against the fence I kept listening for under the unexpected sound of my own voice. There was an old leftover rowboat, chained to the fence, that you could sometimes see the caretaker riding up and down in, dredging the old reservoir of its muck. I would listen for the boat restlessly beating at the fence, for the cries of children in the park, for anything that would take me away from the harsh exultant pain of hearing my own voice ring out on that quiet path.

  Just below the path, raising their heads above the endless white crosses of a soldier's cemetery, were strange red flowers. I did not know their names. But when a sudden breeze scudded along the water, and on one long and single breath of wind the dust flew up from the graveled path and a castoff newspaper flew onto the webbed wire fence, those red flowers along the bottom of the hill would wave and shake and thrash on each other as if they were bleeding together, red pouring on red. From the path to those flowers just below, the way was a plunging fall. In the unbearable stillness of the almost empty park, once you had stopped reading, silence itself took over—a silence so keen, so heartbreakingly firm and implacable across the wide, endlessly wide surface of the water and the long even glare of the sun on the path, that it seemed to come out of the very middle of the air.

  That summer I had my first regular job. Carrying a blue canvas bag in which I kept a book for private reading, I went about the streets of middle Brooklyn all through the long blazing afternoons picking‹ up specimens from drugstores to be delivered to a urinalysis lab on Nostrand Avenue. Between drugstores on my route I often stopped to read in various small parks along the way. I remember how that faint distant odor curiously reminiscent of stale ground-up peanuts clung to the blue surface of the David Copperfield I was always reading on the job, and that whenever I got lost in reading and rode far past my destination, usually found that I had used up the carfare the boss had given me and that I would have to walk it the rest of the way.
But then, in the brilliant heat, the jars and flasks wrapped in brown paper bags tinkling against each other as I walked, that faint odor of stale ground-up peanuts lingering along the cracks in the pavement, I gave myself to those streets I was lost in as if I were swimming in the weather.

  It was the intense silence and heat of those summer streets that delivered me to all my joy. Whenever I guiltily thrust David Copperfield back into my canvas bag and started out fresh from some strange streetcar crossing, I would rush off in a panic, thinking only of the time I had lost and what the boss would say. Then the silence of summer would fall on the top of my head, cleaving me through and through, as if the front of my face alone were rushing ahead to the next drugstore on my list, while my spine dawdled in amazement. There was suddenly anywhere to go now; I had the whole long afternoon to walk around in. My summer's time had come; my own time had come at last. There was a deep aromatic coolness behind the awning of each new drugstore that was made up of cleanness and camphor and the toilet water seeping out of the vials on the counter, of the thick black type and the priestly face on Father John's Cough Medicine, of the clink of an empty spoon against the smooth top of the soda fountain counter, of the dry fizz of soda water backing out of the taps, of the stiff "American" dignity and starched linen jackets on all those strange new Gentile druggists. The insides of all drugstores summer afternoons were hermetically deep. When I walked into one under the awning, out of the glare, it was like floating down to the bottom of a lake with my eyes wide open among the rushes.