A Walker in the City Page 8

  Beyond was that day they took us first to the Botanic Garden next to the Brooklyn Museum, and after we went through the bamboo gate into the Japanese Garden, crossed over a curved wooden bridge past the stone figure of a heron dreaming in the water, I lay in the grass waiting to eat my lunch out of the shoe box and wondered why water lilies floated half-submerged in the pond and did not sink. They led us into the museum that day, up the big stone steps they had then, through vast empty halls that stung my nose with the prickly smell of new varnish and were lined with the effigies of medieval Japanese warriors—the black stringy hairs on their wigs oppressively unreal, the faces mock-terrible as they glared down at us through their stiffly raised swords, everything in that museum wearisome and empty and smelling of floor polish until they pushed us through a circular room upstairs violently ablaze with John Singer Sargent's watercolors of the Caribbean and into a long room lined with oily dim farmscapes of America in the nineteenth century, and I knew I would come back, that I would have to come back.

  Museums and parks were related, both oases to stop in "beyond." But in some way museums and parks were painful, each an explosion of unbearable fullness in my brain. I could never go home from the Brooklyn Museum, a walk around the reservoir in Central Park, or sit in a rowboat Sunday afternoons in Prospect Park—where your voice hallooed against the stone walls of the footbridge as you waited in that sudden cold darkness below, boat against boat, to be pushed on to the boathouse and so end the afternoon—without feeling the same sadness that came after the movies. The day they took us to the Children's Museum—rain was dripping on the porch of that old wooden house, the halls were lined with Audubon prints and were hazel in the thin antique light—I was left with the distinct impression that I had been stirring between my fingers dried earth and fallen leaves that I had found in between the red broken paving stones of some small American town. I seemed to see neighborhood rocks and minerals in the dusty light of the late afternoon slowly stirring behind glass at the back of the village museum. But that same day they took us to Forest Park in Queens, and I saw a clearing filled with stone picnic tables— nothing had ever cried out such a welcome as those stone tables in the clearing—saw the trees in their dim green recede in one long moving tide back into dusk, and gasped in pain when the evening rushed upon us before I had a chance to walk that woodland through.

  There was never enough time. The morning they led us through the Natural History Museum, under the skeletons of great whales floating dreamlike on wires from the ceiling, I had to wait afterward against the meteor in the entrance yard for my dizziness to pass. Those whales! those whales! But that same morning they took us across Central Park to the Metropolitan, and entering through the back door in from the park, I was flung spinning in a bewilderment of delight from the Greek discus-throwers to the Egyptians to the long rows of medieval knights to the breasts of Venus glistening in my eyes as she sat—some curtain drawn before her hiding the worst of her nakedness—smiling with Mars and surrounded by their children.

  The bewilderment eased, a little, when we went up many white steps directly to the American paintings. There was a long, narrow, corridor-looking room lined with the portraits of seventeenth-century merchants and divines—nothing for me there as they coldly stared at me, their faces uninterruptedly rosy in time. But far in the back, in an alcove near the freight elevator, hung so low and the figures so dim in the faint light that I crouched to take them in, were pictures of New York some time after the Civil War—skaters in Central Park, a red muffler flying in the wind; a gay crowd moving round and round Union Square Park; horse cars charging between the brownstones of lower Fifth Avenue at dusk. I could not believe my eyes. Room on room they had painted my city, my country—Winslow Homer's dark oblong of Union soldiers making camp in the rain, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground as I had never thought I would get to see them when we sang that song in school; Thomas Eakins's solitary sculler on the Schuylkill, resting to have his picture taken in the yellow light bright with patches of some raw spring in Pennsylvania showing on the other side of him; and most wonderful to me then, John Sloan's picture of a young girl standing in the wind on the deck of a New York ferryboat—surely to Staten Island, and just about the year of my birth?—looking out to water.

  It had to be something dark, oily, glazed, faintly flaring into gaslight at dusk. Dusk in America any time after the Civil War would be the corridor back and back into that old New York under my feet that always left me half-stunned with its audible cries for recognition. The American past was gaslight and oil glaze, the figures painted dark and growing darker each year on the back walls of the Metropolitan. But they had some strange power over my mind as we went down the white steps into Fifth Avenue at the closing bell—the little Greek heralds on top of the traffic boxes gravely waving me on, my own loneliness gleaming back at me as the street lamps shone on their nude gold chests—that would haunt me any time I ever walked down Fifth Avenue again in the first early evening light.

  It would have to be dusk. Sitting on the fire escape warm spring afternoons over the Oliver Optics, I read them over and over because there was something about old New York in them—often the dimmest drawing in the ad on the back cover of a newsboy howling his papers as he walked past the World building in the snow—that brought back that day at the Metropolitan. I saw Park Row of a winter afternoon in the 1880's, the snow falling into the dark stone streets under Brooklyn Bridge, newsboys running under the maze of telegraph wires that darkened every street of the lower city. How those wires haunted me in every photograph I found of old New York—indescribably heavy, they sagged between the poles; the very streets seemed to sink under their weight. The past was that forest of wires hung over lower New York at five o'clock—dark, heavy, dark; of the time, surely, my parents had first stepped out on the shores of New York at Castle Garden; of the time they had built all police stations in? Walking past our police station on East New York Avenue, I would always be stopped in my tracks by an abysmal nostalgia for the city as it had once been. The green lamps on each side of the station, the drifters along the steps that led down into the public urinals, even the wire netting in the doors of the patrol wagons whose terrifying backs squatted side by side in the yard—all plunged me so suddenly into my daylight dream of walking New York streets in the 1880's that I would wait on the corner, holding my breath, perfectly sure that my increasingly dim but still almighty Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt would come down the steps at any moment.

  It would have to be dusk in the lower city. That steaming spring afternoon I was on my way to a lesson at the Music School Settlement, and deep in Bleecker Street could see the streaky whitewashed letters on the back walls of the tenements FLETCHER'S CASTORIA CHILDREN CRY FOR IT CHARLES S. FLETCH ..., there was a sickening sweetness out of the fur shops, and I saw for the first time derelicts sleeping across the cellar doors—some with empty pint bottles behind their heads; some with dried blood and spittle on their cracked lips, as if they had scraped themselves with knives; some with their flies open, so that the storekeepers cooling themselves in the doorways grinned with scorn and disgust. I knew those men as strangers left over from another period, waiting for me to recognize them. The old pea jackets and caps they slept in were somehow not of the present; they were still in the work clothes they wore on the last job they had had; they bore even in their faces the New York of another century, and once I followed one up the Bowery, strangely sure that he would lead me back into my own, lost, old New York. The El over my head thundered just as it did in that early New York of the Oliver Optics; there were signs hung above the roofs, gold letters on a black field, advertising jewelry, Klein's Special Size Suits For Fat Men, pawnshops. Dusty particles of daylight fell between the tracks of the El; I had never seen anything so right; it was dusk, dusk everywhere in the lower city now all the way to Cooper Square and Bible House and Astor Place, where even the books and prints and sheet music on the stalls were dusty old, and a
s I went up the black stairs of the El station with the Gold Stripe silk stocking ad teasing my eye from step to step, only the cries of the old Jewish women selling salted pretzels near Union Square broke the spell.

  But why that long ride home at all? Why did they live there and we always in "Brunzvil"? Why were they there, and we always here? Why was it always them and us, Gentiles and us, alrightniks and us? Beyond Brownsville was all "the city," that other land I could see for a day, but with every next day back on the block, back to the great wall behind the drugstore I relentlessly had to pound with a handball. Beyond was the strange world of Gentiles, all of them with flaxen hair, who hated Jews, especially poor Jews, had ugly names for us I could never read or hear without seeing Pilsudski's knife cold against our throats. To be a Jew meant that one's very right to existence was always being brought into question. Everyone knew this—even the Communists summer nights on Pitkin Avenue said so, could make the most listless crowd weep with reminders of what they were doing to us in Fascist Poland, Roumania, Hungary. It was what I had always heard in the great Kol Nidre sung in the first evening hours of the Day of Atonement, had played on my violin for them Friday evenings in the dining room whenever I felt lost and wanted to show them how much I loved them, knew them through and through, would suffer loyally with them. Jews were Jews; Gentiles were Gentiles. The line between them had been drawn for all time. What had my private walks into the city to do with anything!

  But one humid morning, that summer I was confirmed at thirteen, I wearily unwound the stiff black thongs of the phylacteries from my left arm, which is nearest the heart; removed from my forehead, for that is over the brain, the little black box in which is inscribed the Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One; folded and put away the silk blue-striped prayer shawl I loved—and wearily climbed out onto the fire escape, into the steaming midmorning air, absently holding my prayer book. I had never really looked at that lefthand English page of the prayer book, had imagined from something even my parents had said, perplexed and amused as they were by my private orthodoxy, that it was not entirely proper to look at prayers in English translation. But early summer morning in Brownsville: the pigeons rasping in their cages, the kids still too young for handball with a regulation black hard ball already at their first game of boxball in the street, the sun so fierce on the iron floor of the fire escape that I had to sit on the windowsill, my bottom prickly on the pebbled stone. Everything in sight looked half-dead; I could see some women already out on their kitchen chairs for the day, panting as the sweat ran down their red angry necks into the unbuttoned tops of their housedresses. I listlessly picked up my little prayer book, too tired now even to finish reading the last blessings, and in an agony of surprise, as if I could distinctly hear great seas breaking around me, read aloud to myself:

  For the Lord is a Great God, and a great king above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; and the summit of the hills is his also. The sea is his, for he made it; and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down, bend the knee, and prostrate ourselves before the Lord who has made us. For he is our God, and we are the flock of his pasture, and the sheep of his herd; even tins day if ye will hearken to his voice. Harden not your hearts, as in the day of strife and temptation in the wilder-ness, when your fathers provoked me, and proved me, though they saw my wondrous work. Forty years was I grieved with this generation, and said, it is a people of erring heart, for they have not considered my ways. Then I swore in my wrath that they should not come to the place of my rest.

  True and certain, established, sure, just, faithful, beloved, esteemed, desirable and pleasant, awful, mighty, regular, acceptable, good and beautiful, is this word unto us for evermore.

  I had never realized that this, this deepness, lay under the gloomy obscurities of Shabbes in our little wooden synagogue on Chester Street; that my miserable melamed with a few dried peas sticking to his underlip and ready to slap my hands at every mistake had known this. When your fathers provoked me! How many fathers I had! Morning after morning now, the phylacteries forgotten, I sat on the fire escape with the Hebrew Bible whose left pages in English I had looked into only to enlist the support of Deborah, fiery prophetess of Israel, and now glowed when I came to those lines in the Book of Ruth that seemed to speak for me to the Jews: Urge me not to leave thee, to return from following thee; for whither thou goest, will I go; and where thou lodgest, will I lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. How many fathers! How, even as the elders smelling of snuff in our little wooden synagogue at evening service—how each of my fathers must have stood up alone, and each wrapped round and round in his prayer shawl, as at the moment of his death, addressed himself in the deepest prayer to God alone. We were a mighty people, a mighty people, and He our mighty father. I could feel in the surge of that prayer book the divine power of that Great One before Whom I had bound my left arm in the black thongs of the phylacteries and had strapped the little black box on my forehead, thus pledging my heart and my brain in devotion to Him. It was all One, I read now: from the power of the All-Highest to the lowliest Jew in prayer, it was all One. Now, on the "Great Day," the Atonement Day itself, I could wait patiently through the long morning and endless afternoon of fasting and prayer for that unforgettable moment when the faithful bowed their heads, and, each man smiting himself on the breast over and over in the bitterest repentance for every sin committed during the year, all went through the long catalogue in unison, finding in its enumeration, as I thought, a kind of purifying ecstasy, for they were summing up the whole earthly life of Brownsville:

  Our God, and God of Our Fathers,

  Verily, we confess, we have sinned

  We have trespassed

  We have dealt treacherously

  We have stolen

  We have spoken slander

  We have committed iniquity and have done wickedly

  We have acted presumptuously

  We have committed violence

  We have said falsehood

  We have counseled evil

  We have uttered lies

  We have scorned

  We have rebelled

  We have blasphemed

  We have revolted

  We have acted perversely

  We have transgressed

  The voice that spoke in that prayer book seemed to come out of my very bowels. There was something grand and austere in it that confirmed everything I had felt in my bones about being a Jew: the fierce awareness of life to the depths, every day and in every hour: the commitment: the hunger.

  Only, there was no gladness in it. Morning after morning, as I read that prayer book on the fire escape, the English words, too, though so strangely fundamental that it moved me just to say them aloud, took on the same abasement before the monotonous Gcd I had always known. There was a familiar dread in that prayer book, a despairing supplication, that reminded me of my mother's humility before the doctors in the public dispensary on Thatford Avenue and of my own fear of all teachers at school. It looked as if Brownsville, too, had been set up by divine order. Was being a Jew the same as living in Brownsville? Were they really Jews, those who lived beyond Brownsville? I wanted nothing so much as to be a "good Jew," as they said in the Talmud Torah on Stone Avenue. But even in their great synagogue, under the chandeliers terrible with sun all through the "Great Day" of Atonement, I had heard them up in the front pews nearest the Ark making a little deal whenever they looked up at intervals from the prayers they were mumbling so fast that even they, I guessed, had no notion what the words meant. They neither believed nor disbelieved; they never thought about it; He had been with us a long time. Only, there was no promise of gladness in Him. Surely He had been real in der heym? I had read about the Chassidim, "great enthusiasts, dancers, walkers"—poor East European Jews, only the poorest, but so full of the Lord that they danced before Him in their joy. There were my people! But when you asked around, hoping there had been at least one Chassid somewhere among
all your many praying grandfathers and great grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers—surely there had been at least one! surely there was one still among those ancient bearded elders in our synagogue!—they shrugged their shoulders, said something about old-fashioned customs, mishegóyim, crazy ones, comfortably took another pinch of snuff, first in one nostril, then in the other, sneezed heartily, and went back to their prayers.

  So if you had sat too long on the fire escape, were getting dizzy and lonely in the sun with all your own thoughts locked up inside you—you had only to shake a leg, take up a book to read on the long subway ride, and getting off anywhere, walk it off—not ashamed to think your own thoughts, to sing, ready to meet beautiful unmet Chassidim, even to pray as you pleased. Walking, I always knew how I felt by the music in my head.

  Now, summer by summer, when I went about Brooklyn delivering the Eagle; or went up and down the sands of Coney Island selling Eskimo Pies; or stopped in the Brooklyn Museum to look at the Ryders; or in front of the Library at Fifth and 42nd, waiting for the light to change, laughed right out loud because I had just sat my first exultant hour in those long sun-filled reading rooms on the third floor; or floundered and gawked my way past Cleopatra's Needle to the back door of the Metropolitan, to take in, now, Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream and Thomas Eakins's portrait of Walt Whitman in a lace collar; or with a knapsack my mother had made for me out of old laundry bags walked over the Palisades to Alpine—now, when I stopped to catch my breath under the shepherd's crook of a lamp pole in Brooklyn, the streets themselves reeled for joy, and whenever I humbly retired into the subway for the long ride home, something would automatically pull me out at Brooklyn Bridge for one last good walk across the promenade before I fell into the subway again.