A Walker in the City Read online

Everything ahead of me now was of a different order—wide, clean, still, every block lined with trees. I sniffed hungrily at the patches of garden earth behind the black iron spikes and at the wooden shutters hot in the sun—there where even the names of the streets, Macdougal, Hull, Somers, made me humble with admiration. The long quiet avenues rustled comfortably in the sun; above the brownstone stoops all the yellow striped awnings were unfurled. Every image I had of peace, of quiet shaded streets in some old small-town America I had seen dreaming over the ads in the Saturday Evening Post, now came back to me as that proud procession of awnings along the brownstones. I can never remember walking those last few blocks to the library; I seemed to float along the canvas tops. Here were the truly American streets; here was where they lived. To get that near to brownstones, to see how private everything looked in that world of cool black painted floors and green walls where on each windowsill the first shoots of Dutch bulbs rose out of the pebbles like green and white flags, seemed to me the greatest privilege I had ever had. A breath of long-stored memory blew out at me from the veranda of Oyster Bay. Even when I visited an Irish girl from my high school class who lived in one of those brownstones, and was amazed to see that the rooms were as small as ours, that a Tammany court attendant's family could be as poor as we were, that behind the solid "American" front of fringed shawls, Yankee rocking chairs, and oval daguerreotypes on the walls they kept warm in winter over an oil stove—even then, I could think of those brownstone streets only as my great entrance into America, a half-hour nearer to "New York."

  I had made a discovery; I had stumbled on a connection between myself and the shape and color of time in the streets of New York. Though I knew that brownstones were old-fashioned and had read scornful references to them in novels, it was just the thick, solid way in which they gripped to themselves some texture of the city's past that now fascinated me. There was one brownstone on Macdougal Street I would stop and brood over for long periods every evening I went to the library for fresh books—waiting in front of it, studying every crease in the stone, every line in the square windows jutting out above the street, as if I were planning its portrait. I had made a discovery: walking could take me back into the America of the nineteenth century.

  On those early summer evenings, the library was usually empty, and there was such ease at the long tables under the plants lining the windowsills, the same books of American history lay so undisturbed on the shelves, the wizened, faintly smiling little old lady who accepted my presence without questions or suggestions or reproach was so delightful as she quietly, smilingly stamped my card and took back a batch of new books every evening, that whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves. For each new book I took away, there seemed to be ten more of which I was depriving myself. Everything that summer I was sixteen was of equal urgency—Renan's Life of Jesus; the plays of Eugene O'Neill, which vaguely depressed me, but were full of sex; Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, to which I was so devoted that even on the day two years later Hitler came to power I could not entirely take it in, because on the same day John Galsworthy died; anything about Keats and Blake; about Beethoven; the plays of W. Somerset Maugham, which I could not relate to the author of Of Human Bondage; The Education of Henry Adams, for its portrait of John Quincy Adams leading his grandson to school; Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, for its portrait of Cardinal Newman, the beautiful Newman who played the violin and was seen weeping in the long sad evening of his life; Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which seemed to me vaguely sinister and unbearably profound; Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, which I took away one evening to finish on my fire escape with such a depth of satisfaction that I could never open the book again, for fear I would not recapture that first sensation.

  The automatic part of all my reading was history. The past, the past was great: anything American, old, glazed, touched with dusk at the end of the nineteenth century, still smoldering with the fires lit by the industrial revolution, immediately set my mind dancing. The present was mean, the eighteenth century too Anglo-Saxon, too far away. Between them, in the light from the steerage ships waiting to discharge my parents onto the final shore, was the world of dusk, of rust, of iron, of gaslight, where, I thought, I would find my way to that fork in the road where all American lives cross. The past was deep, deep, full of solitary Americans whose careers, though closed in death, had woven an arc around them which I could see in space and time—"lonely Americans," it was even the title of a book. I remember that the evening I opened Lewis Mumford's The Brown Decades I was so astonished to see a photograph of Brooklyn Bridge, I so instantly formed against that brownstone on Macdougal Street such close and loving images of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Peirce, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Eakins, and John August Roebling, that I could never walk across Roebling's bridge, or pass the hotel on University Place named Albert, in Ryder's honor, or stop in front of the garbage cans at Fulton and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn at the place where Whitman had himself printed Leaves of Grass, without thinking that I had at last opened the great trunk of forgotten time in New York in which I, too, I thought, would someday find the source of my unrest.

  I felt then that I stood outside all that, that I would be alien forever, but that I could at least keep the trunk open by reading. And though I knew somewhere in myself that a Ryder, an Emily Dickinson, an Eakins, a Whitman, even that fierce-browed old German immigrant Roebling, with his flute and his metaphysics and his passionate love of suspension bridges, were alien, too, alien in the deepest way, like my beloved Blake, my Yeshua, my Beethoven, my Newman—nevertheless I still thought of myself then as standing outside America. I read as if books would fill my every gap, legitimize my strange quest for the American past, remedy my every flaw, let me in at last into the great world that was anything just out of Brownsville.

  So that when, leaving the library for the best of all walks, to Highland Park, I came out on Bushwick Avenue, with its strange, wide, sun-lit spell, a thankfulness seized me, mixed with envy and bitterness, and I waited against a hydrant for my violence to pass. Why were these people here, and we there? Why had I always to think of insider and outsider, of their belonging and our not belonging, when books had carried me this far, and when, as I could already see, it was myself that would carry me farther—beyond these petty distinctions I had so long made in loneliness?

  But Highland Park was different; Highland Park was pure idea. To savor it fully at the end of a walk, I liked to start out fresh from Brownsville. Summer nights that year I was sixteen and she was fifteen, I used to meet her on East New York Avenue, at the corner of the police station. Our route was always up Liberty Avenue, where the old yellow frame houses looked like the remains of a mining town, and the cracks in the pavement opened a fissure that trailed into hills of broken automobile parts littering the junk shops.

  The way to the park is north and west, past the Brooklyn line altogether. At the border, the trolley car lines and elevated lines snarl up into one last drab knot; then it is like a fist opening, and the way ahead is clear. We trudged up endless small city hills; except for the rattling of the freight cars in the railroad yards and an occasional watchman's light in the factories, the streets seemed entirely dead. We went past the factories, the freight yards, the hospital, the Long Island railroad station, an abandoned schoolhouse and an old pottery, its green roof cracked and engraved in thousands of small lines, as if everyone passing that way had knifed his name on it. The way up the hills was always strange, no matter how many times we followed it, for every step took us into the parkway off Bushwick Avenue, with its latticed entrances to the German beer gardens.

  At Highland Boulevard the last of the factories vanished below the hill, and the park emerged in its summer sweetness. At every corner along the boulevard there were great trees; as we stopped at the top to catch our breaths, the traffic lights turned red and green on the trees and each leaf Hushed separately in the colored light. I used to watch the signal
s switching red and green on the leaves. The click in the signal box had a humorous sound on the deserted boulevard, and as the light poured on the leaves, green and red, green and red, with a moment's pause between them, I seemed to see some force weary of custom, aroused against the monotony of day and night, playing violently with color in the freedom of the summer evening.

  In those days the park lay open along the boulevard. They were always making half-hearted repairs on it that no one ever seemed to finish; we could enter the park anywhere—over the great stone fence above the cemetery; or over planks the workmen had laid between mounds of sand near the basketball court; or up its own hill to the reservoir itself. It was somehow not a real park then, not the usual city park—more like an untended wild growth they had forgotten to trim to the shape of the city. Most people I knew did not care for it; it was too remote, and at night, almost completely dark. It ran past interminable cemeteries where there seemed to be room for all the dead of New York.

  But all this made the park more interesting to us. Our favorite way was past the mounds that stood just in from the boulevard. There was something in this I liked—a feeling that we were secretly descending on the park from a great height. I took her hand, and step by step, walking carefully over the planks the workmen had left, we went down into the empty park, past the basketball court, the gardens, the bandstand, until we could hear the old rowboat banging against the wire fence and climb up the hill to the reservoir.

  From one side of the reservoir hill we could look across the cemetery to the skyscrapers of Manhattan; from the other, to miles of lampposts along Jamaica Avenue. Below us was a wood, then a military cemetery, slope on slope laid out in endless white crosses. We never tired of walking round the reservoir arm in arm, watching the light playing on the water, and going, as it seemed, from one flank of New York to the other. The city was no longer real; only a view from a distance, interrupted by cemeteries on every side. But on a summer night, when we lay in the grass below, the smell of the earth and the lights from the distant city made a single background to my desire. The lampposts winked steadily from Jamaica Avenue, and the YMCA's enormous sign glowed and died and glowed again. Somewhere in the deadness of the park the water gurgled in the fountains. In the warmth and stillness a yearning dry and sharp as salt rose in me. Far away a whistle hooted; far away girls went round and round the path, laughing. When we went home, taking the road past the cemetery, with the lights of Jamaica Avenue spread out before us, it was hard to think of them as something apart, they were searching out so many new things in me.