A Walker in the City Read online

  For all those first summer walks into the city, all daily walks across the bridge for years afterward, when I came to leave Brownsville at last, were efforts to understand one single half-hour at dusk, on a dark winter day, the year I was fourteen. There had been some school excursion that day to City Hall and the courts of lower New York, and looking up at the green dome of the World as we came into Park Row, I found myself separated from the class, and decided to go it across the bridge alone. I remember holding a little red volume of THE WORLD'S GREATEST SELECTED SHORT STORIES in my hand as I started out under the groined arcade of the Municipal Building and the rusty green-black terminal of the El sweeping onto the bridge from Park Row—somewhere in the course of that walk across the bridge the last of those volumes got lost for all time. Evening was coming on fast, great crowds in thick black overcoats were pounding up the staircases to the El; the whole bridge seemed to shake under the furious blows of that crowd starting for home.

  Rush hour above, on every side, below: the iron wheels of the El trains shooting blue-white sparks against the black, black tracks sweeping in from Chinatown and Oliver Street under the black tar roofs and fire escapes and empty window boxes along the grimy black tenements on whose sides I could see the streaky whitewashed letters CHILDREN CRY FOR IT FLETCHER'S CASTORIA CHARLES S. FLETCHER; trolley cars bounding up into the air on each side of me, their bells clanging, clanging; cars sweeping off the bridge and onto the bridge in the narrow last roadways before me.

  Then a long line of naked electric bulbs hung on wires above the newsstands and hot dog stands in the arcade, raw light glittering above the flaky iron rust, newsboys selling the Evening World, the smell of popcorn and of frankfurters sizzling on the grill. And now up a flight of metal-edged wooden steps and into the open at last, the evening coming on faster and faster, a first few flakes of snow in the air, the lights blue and hard up one side of the transparent staircases in Wall Street, dark on another; the river black, inky black; then the long hollow boom shivering the worn wooden planks under my feet as a ship passes under the bridge.

  Dusk of a dark winter's day that first hour walking Brooklyn Bridge. Suddenly I felt lost and happy as I went up another flight of steps, passed under the arches of the tower, and waited, next to a black barrel, at the railing of the observation platform. The trolleys clanged and clanged; every angry stalled car below sounded its horn as, bumper to bumper, they all poked their way along the bridge; the El trains crackled and thundered over my right shoulder. A clock across the street showed its lighted face; along the fire escapes of the building were sculptured figures of runners and baseball players, of prize fighters flexing their muscles and wearing their championship belts, just as they did in the Police Gazette. But from that platform under the tower the way ahead was strange. Only the electric sign of the Jewish Daily Forward, burning high over the tenements of the East Side, suddenly stilled the riot in my heart as I saw the cables leap up to the tower, saw those great meshed triangles leap up and up, higher and still higher—Lord my Lord, when will they cease to drive me up with them in their flight?—and then, each line singing out alone the higher it came and nearer, fly flaming into the topmost eyelets of the tower.

  Somewhere below they were roasting coffee, handling spices—the odor was in the pillars, in the battered wooden planks of the promenade under my feet, in the blackness upwelling from the river. A painter's scaffold dangled down one side of the tower over a spattered canvas. Never again would I walk Brooklyn Bridge without smelling that coffee, those spices, the paint on that canvas. The trolley car clanged, clanged, clanged taking me home that day from the bridge. Papa, where are they taking me? Where in this beyond are they taking me?

  Every next day the battle with the back wall of the drugstore began again. There was something about that wall just under the front windows of our house that constantly angered me, then blankly receiving every blow, called on me to try again. I mastered that wall every day, but could never know if I had really won. "What have you boys got against that wall?" my mother used to say wonderingly. "What is in a wall?" But at any moment of the afternoon or evening, so long as there was still light to see by, you might see a boy slowly and cagily throwing a ball against it with a sidelong look at you, shaping the strokes off his right arm as if he were sharpening a knife. You had to take him up; his insolence blocked you on every side; he would test you up and down the whole length of that wall. So that when at last you stood up against it in a game "for money" the real thing, between the milk cans in front of the grocery windows and the jagged iron spikes above the stairway to the cellar, and you saw that first high bounding serve floating spinning eerily at you over the telephone wires, your whole heart twisted as you unconsciously leaped up to smash it back, to ignore the square aching pain of that hard rubber ball in the palm of your hand—to send it back, only to send it back!

  In that moment everything waited on my performance; the women at their windows seemed to be quiet, watching me. As I faced that wall in the thudding silence, my arm crooked in defiance, it seemed to me I could hear voices two blocks away as I tasted the grime of the cellar steps and the white ooze under the freshly pasted Hecker's Flour sign. Then everything fell scalding into hammer blows. Wiping the sweat off our chins only when we panted back from the wall after each hit, knees bent and hands on our thighs with professional alertness, each body slightly stooped in the agony of effort, we gravely and suspiciously danced around each other, darting into vacated positions with our hands still lifted, ready for anything—then "accidentally" ran in front of our opponents to block their view, and when it was our turn to hit the ball back, rushed in for a killer, sometimes flinging ourselves in our fury against the wall itself. I think now of my astonishment as I rushed at it, the deep spaces between the brick yawning up at me, the tar letters DAZZY DAZZY DAZZY unwinding in my mind as I danced back to the curb. There was a terrible pre-eminence in myself when I stood right up against it, alone before the wall to hit a serve. I could feel myself bowing down the whole length of that wall, waiting to lash out.

  I was afraid of the cellar. Each family in the house had a coal bin of its own in the days before steam heat. I would help my father and mother shovel the winter's coal into our bin, then shovel it out again every other day into a black pail that I carried upstairs to our kitchen. You had to fasten the Yale lock good and hard; it was always expected that the tough guys on the block would break into your bin. The cellar was a winter clubhouse. Whenever I forced open the cellar doors next to the barbershop and let myself down the narrow steps with the pail banging behind me and an inch of candle burning in my hand, I could take in, along with the smell of coal dust and damp and the stray cats mewing in the bins, some wilder, rancid smell that told me someone was "hiding away" with a girl. That cellar was made up in even parts of silence and blackness. Only the clang of the cellar doors as they fell together behind me, or a mound of coal shifting against the bin doors—then the cats screamed in fright—ever broke into the damp blackness of the cellar. But when my candle blew out, and I scraped another kitchen match against the floor, I thought I could hear something stirring near the fuse boxes. Then the dripping tallow thickened wildly on my thumb and the acrid sulphur smell of the match burned at my nostrils. Something was happening. Someone was there. But door after door the bins looked blind and shut. From the coal bins to the backyard there was nothing but damp black passage—only a faint haze of blue smoke under the fuse boxes. Where did they do it? How? Once, as the bin door creaked too loudly as I opened the lock, and my shovel scraped against the floor, I thought I heard footsteps running toward the yard.

  The yard smelled of brick and was thickmatted with clotheslines. On every side the white backs of the two tenements rose up around you, enclosing you in a narrow circle littered with splintered crates, loose sheets of old newspaper, garbage cans, and the thin green ooze left behind by the cats. Great shafts of light poured through the space between the roofs, rewhitening the sheets hung ac
ross the yard. Every particle of light falling into the yard seemed to dissolve into the color of that dusty white brick at the back, revolved in the air as if shot out of a great open bag of flour. When you were in the yard, you could look only straight up, the clotheslines seemed about to strangle you—the place was so narrow, so narrow; held you in a cylinder of white dust and the noise from the back windows.

  Every voice raised in that yard crashed against the walls like a bullet. One by one they would come there all through the first warm afternoons of spring—the Yiddish tenors, the old clothes men, the forgotten fiddlers, the German cornetists, even Blumka the madwoman, who would drag her cart in if the women on the block had not given her enough, and howl curses up at the back windows—one by one each would stand up on that little slope where we raised snowhouses in winter, and alone in the yard, cry up to the housewives who were wrapping pennies in little pieces of newspaper before throwing them into the yard. The singers always sang the same story, always cried to the same grief. But it was not for their music I listened—it was to the voice itself rebounding against brick; the voice that crept up each window to the roof, insinuated itself into every back bedroom and down the hollows in a woman's back as standing against the window, she raised her hands to pull a dress over her head—a voice struggling to be heard against the pandemonium that filled the yard, that was sometimes entirely lost in the swish of the sheets and the clatter of the pulleys as the clotheslines were brought in, but always bounding up again hard and clear in the great narrow shaft, forced me to look through the tangled web of clotheslines to the figure standing alone in the middle of the yard.

  From the bottom of that yard sensations reached me for which I would have no final accounting. They stole up at me from the grittiness of the brick in the staleness of the long afternoons, the mewing of the cats in the cellar, the orange rinds and newspapers and splintered wooden crates, until I could feel what I thought like a new layer over my skin. Those singers had something to tell me, simply by the way they held the depths of the bottom of the yard. Sometimes the voice had to fight every sound from the back windows; when I looked down, I had a sudden image of the singer at the bottom of a well, sinking under the weight of the clotheslines, but in one last furious entreaty to be heard, still pitting himself against every scream and cry falling into the yard. But below the easy Yiddish plaint, the dry sobs and tears, the stolid singsong I cash old clóthes! I cash old clóthes!, I heard some smiling indifference that lisped across the yard drop by drop, reached up to a woman's shoulders naked at the window like a negligent caress.

  The fruit and vegetable stand, the drygoods store, the luggage shop, the rummage shop that sold second-hand books. Only the corsetmaker's is left, his windows still lined with his old European diplomas and gold-sealed certificates of honor presented to him in 1906 at the Brussels Fair. Everywhere else—BARGAINS BARGAINS—the second-hand furniture stores have taken over our block, turning the old life out into the street. But walking past what had once been the candy store, I tasted all the old sweetness of malted milks on my tongue, breathed again the strong sweet fumes of the Murads and Helmars and Lord Salisburys our fathers smoked. Going past what had once been the rummage shop I could feel in my pocket the touch of all the hand-me-down Frank and Dick Merri-wells I had bought there for a nickel each, and the copy of Edward Dowden's life of Browning I had read because it cost a dime, and the muddy paper-backed edition of Great Poems in the English Language where I first read Blake:

  Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,

  Little Lamb, Vll tell thee:

  It is the old drugstore on the corner I miss most. All those maple beds in the window have made that store stupid; it has nothing to say to me now. Once it was the most exciting threshold I had ever crossed. In the windows glass urns of rose and pink and blue colored water hung from chains; in the doorway I took in the smell of camphor and mothballs and brown paper wardrobes whenever I earned three cents calling someone to the telephone; across from the telephone booths there hung over the black stippled wallpaper that large color picture, a present from a dye company, of General Israel Putnam on his horse riding up some stone steps just ahead of the British, but with his face turned back to me so that I could see it glorious with defiance.

  Night after night in the winter, long after I had thrown my book on the kitchen floor and had pulled the string of the bulb in the ceiling, I would push myself as deep under the quilt as I could get, and lie there on the kitchen chairs near the stove thinking of Mrs. Solovey. And often in the middle of the night, I would be awakened by the sound of Negroes singing as they passed under our windows on their way back to Livonia Avenue, and would pick up my book again as if to follow out to the end the phrase I had just heard. Then I seemed to confuse her blond hair with the long hair shining down the backs of the women in the placards on Mr. Solovey's counter advertising brilliantine. In those placards, their eyes wide open in adoration of their own richness, all women looked as if they were dreaming, too. Sometimes they had the hair of Blumka the madwoman, and sometimes the look of our unmarried cousin in her embroidered Russian blouse, long after she had gone away from us forever and I would sit on her bed staring miserably at the bookcase.

  Under the quilt at night, I could dream even before I went to sleep. Yet even there I could never see Mrs. Solovey's face clearly, but still ran round and round the block looking for her after I had passed her kitchen window. It was an old trick, the surest way of getting to sleep: I put the quilt high over my head and lay there burrowing as deep into the darkness as I could get, thinking of her through the long black hair the women on the counter wore. Then I would make up dreams before going to sleep: a face behind the lattice of a summer house, half-hidden in thick green leaves; the hard dots sticking out of the black wallpaper below; the day my mother was ill and our cousin had taken me to school. The moment I felt myself drifting into sleep, my right knee jerked as if I had just caught myself from tripping over something in the gutter. Then I would start up in fright, and perfectly awake, watching the flames dance out from under the covers in the stove, would dream of the druggist's wife and of her blond hair. I had not seen many fair-haired people until I met Mrs. Solovey. There were the Polish "broads" from East New York, smoking cigarettes on someone's lap in the "Coney Island" dives across the street from school, the sheen down their calves and the wickedness of their painted lips what you expected of a blonde. There were the four daughters of our Russian Christian janitor, Mrs. Krylot, all of them with bright golden hair and faces deeply carved and immobile as a wood cut. But they did not count; they smelled of the salt butter the Gentiles used; their blondness seemed naive and uncouth. Mrs. Solovey's I had identified from the first with something direct and sinful.

  The Soloveys had been very puzzling; from the day they had come to our tenement, taking over the small dark apartment on the ground floor next to his drugstore, no one had been able to make them out at all. Both the Soloveys had had an inaccessible air of culture that to the end had made them seem visitors among us. They had brought into our house and street the breath of another world, where parents read books, discussed ideas at the table, and displayed a quaint, cold politeness addressing each other. The Soloveys had traveled; they had lived in Palestine, France, Italy. They were "professional" people, "enlightened"—she, it was rumored, had even been a physician or "some kind of scientist," we could never discover which.

  The greatest mystery was why they had come to live in Brownsville. We looked down on them for this, and suspected them. To come deliberately to Brownsville, after you had lived in France and Italy! It suggested some moral sickness, apathy, a perversion of all right feelings. The apathy alone had been enough to excite me. They were different!

  Of course the Soloveys were extremely poor—how else could they even have thought of moving in among us? There were two drab little girls with Hebrew names, who went about in foreign clothes, looking so ill-nourished that my mother was indignant, and vowed to abduct them from t
heir strange parents for an afternoon and feed them up thoroughly. Mrs. Solovey was herself so thin, shy, and gently aloof that she seemed to float away from me whenever I passed her in the hall. There was no doubt in our minds that the Soloveys had come to Brownsville at the end of their road. But what had they hoped to gain from us? If they had ever thought of making money in a Brownsville drugstore, they were soon disenchanted. The women on the block bought such drugs as they had to when illness came. But they did not go in for luxuries, and they had a hearty, familiar way of expecting credit as their natural right from a neighbor and fellow Jew that invariably made Mr. Solovey furious. That was only for the principle of the thing: he showed no interest in making money. He seemed to despise his profession, and the store soon became so clogged with dust and mothballs and camphor-smelling paper wardrobes and the shampoo ads indignantly left him by salesmen of beauty preparations which he refused to stock, that people hated to go in. They all thought him cynical and arrogant. Although he understood well enough when someone addressed him in Yiddish, he seemed to dislike the language, and only frowned, curtly nodding his head to show that he understood. The Soloveys talked Russian to each other, and though we were impressed to hear them going on this way between themselves, everyone else disliked them for it. Not to use our familiar neighborhood speech, not even the English expected of the "educated," meant that they wanted us not to understand them.