Acquainted with the Night (6 page)

“Hello, Paul. I wanted to see you,” his father said. His suit was creased. His striped shirt was wrinkled, too. He lit a cigarette.

“I ...” Paul tried to say, but only a crackling sound came. Tears filled his eyes. He feared that he was going to collapse into his father’s arms and cry like a child. He didn’t want to do that, but he felt it was going to happen anyway. Then he heard the soft padding sounds of his mother’s slippered feet and he waited, gripped with curiosity to see who she would be this time. Nan was simply herself, worn, gray-faced, smoothing her dress and brushing the hair out of her eyes.

“Richard? I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Hello, Nan. I thought I was coming for dinner. Or do I have the wrong night?”

“Dinner?” she whispered.

“Dinner. What’s the matter? Are you sick or something?”

Nan leaned on the kitchen doorframe. “Richard, I assumed after you called this morning that you weren’t coming.”

Paul rolled his aching eyes from one to the other. It was like a play, just as she had said.

“Oh, did I say that? I don’t remember. I wanted to see Paul. Nan, we can still see each other, after all—”

“Richard, you’re insane.” It was that voice again.

“Now let’s not get started like that. Can’t we even meet without accusations? Always the same old story. God, how did I ever put up with it for so long,” he grumbled bitterly, turning away and walking to the window with his hands thrust in his pockets.

Nan straightened up. “All right. Dinner.” Her voice was charged now with an eerie brightness. “What’s for dinner? Anyone have any ideas? What can we serve on short notice for our distinguished guest?”

“I’ll get dinner,” said Paul.

They stared at him in surprise, as if they had forgotten he was there.

“I’ll get dinner,” he repeated in a loud, hoarse voice. Paul shoved past Nan into the kitchen. His hands were shaking again. He yanked open a drawer and took out the carving knife. Clutching its handle tightly to steady the trembling, he held it out straight in front of him and returned to the doorway. He looked from one to the other. They were standing in the same places, Nan slumped against the doorframe and Richard farther away, at the window, hands in his pockets. They didn’t know yet. Nan was not looking at him but at Richard.

His father noticed him first. “Paul?” he said quietly, and started towards him. Then Nan saw too and gasped. Her hand jerked up to her mouth.

“Don’t come near me,” said Paul. Nan stepped aside, but Richard moved closer to grab his wrist. Paul flicked the knife upward so it grazed the sleeve of Richard’s jacket.

“I’m going to solve all your problems for you,” Paul said.

“Paul, no, put it down, please,” said Nan. He ignored her. Richard was affecting nonchalance now, standing nearby in a relaxed pose, waiting for Paul to lose his nerve and drop the knife.

Paul imagined the thrust, how hard and deep he would have to push, the resistance of the flesh and then the crowning surge of warm blood. It would be the greatest release of his life, a great flow, a torrent. He stepped toward Nan, who cringed, then he stepped back. He moved toward Richard, who inched back cautiously. To Nan again. Then Richard. Then Nan. They were holding their breath, terrified of him. Whose blood? The question darted through his head, in and out of turns and dark corridors, a maze with no exit, and then suddenly balked, up against a flat wall of flaming red, he swiveled the knife and sliced inside his own wrist. A path opened, a thin red line, then an ooze, a stream, dripping from his trembling arm onto the green carpet. He dropped the knife. They were upon him, Nan whimpering and rocking to and fro, Richard embracing him and sobbing. Nan ran for a dish towel and bound it tightly around his wrist.

“Quick, let’s get him into the car,” she cried. “Get his coat.”

Richard stood sobbing in choking gulps. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Nan threw a coat over Paul’s shoulders and pushed them both towards the door. She was swift and efficient.

“I did this,” moaned Richard. “This is my doing.”

She had a moment, at the elevator, to place a hand on his shoulder and lean against him. “Oh, Richard,” she said gently in a soft wail, “you can’t leave now. Oh, you can’t. You see how much he needs you.”

Richard nodded again and again, wiping his eyes with his fist.

The towel was sopping with blood, but luckily Nan had remembered to bring along extras. She changed the bandage and dropped the dripping red towel in a trash can outside the front door.

“Poor child,” she murmured. “Oh, my poor baby.”

“I’ll do anything for him now,” said Richard. He had stopped crying and was slamming the car door shut and starting the engine. “He’ll need more intensive treatment. I’ll have a consultation with Dr. Crewes. Can you stand to have me—”

“We’ll work everything out, everything. Just so long as he’s all right,” said Nan from the back seat, where she sat cradling Paul’s head in her lap.

T
HEY SAY MEMORY ENHANCES
places, but my childhood block of small brick row houses grows smaller every year, till there is barely room for me to stand upright in my own recollections. The broad avenue on our corner, gateway to the rest of the world, an avenue so broad that for a long time I was not permitted to cross it alone, has narrowed to a strait, and its row of tiny shops—dry cleaners, candy store, beauty parlor, grocery store—has dwindled to a row of cells. On my little block itself the hedges, once staunch walls guarding the approach to every house, are shrunken, their sharp dark leaves stunted. The hydrangea bush—what we called a snowball bush—in front of the house next to mine has shrunk; its snowballs have melted down. And the ledges from each front walk to each driveway, against whose once-great stone walls we played King, a kind of inverse handball, and from whose tops we jumped with delectable agonies of fear—ah, those ledges have sunk, those leaps are nothing. Small.

In actuality, of course, my Brooklyn neighborhood has not shrunk but it has changed. Among the people I grew up with, that is understood as a euphemism meaning black people have moved in. They moved in family by family, and one by one the old white families moved out, outwards, that is, in an outward direction (Long Island, Rockaway, Queens), the direction of water—it seems not to have occurred to them that soon there would be nowhere to go unless back into the surf where we all began—except for two of the old white families who bravely remained and sent reports in the outward directions that living with the black people was fine, they were nice people, good neighbors, and so these two white families came to be regarded by the departed as sacrificial heroes of sorts; everyone admired them but no one would have wished to emulate them.

The changes the black families brought to the uniform block were mostly in the way of adornment. Colorful shutters affixed to the front casement windows, flagstones on the walkways leading to the porch steps, flowers on the bordering patches of grass, and quantities of ornamental wrought iron; a few of the brick porch walls have even been replaced by wrought-iron ones. (Those adjacent porches with their low dividing walls linked our lives. We girls visited back and forth climbing from porch to porch to porch, peeking into living room windows as we darted by.) But for all these proprietary changes, my block looks not so very different, in essence. It has remained middle class.

Black people appeared on the block when I lived there too, but they were maids, and very few at that. Those few came once a week, except for the three families where the mothers were schoolteachers; their maids came every day and were like one of the family, or so the families boasted, overlooking the fact that the maids had families of their own. One other exception: the family next door to mine who had the snowball bush also had a live-in maid who did appear to live like one of the family. It was easy to forget that she cleaned and cooked while the family took their ease, because when her labors were done she ate with them and then sat on the porch and contributed her opinions to the neighborhood gossip. They had gotten her from the South when she was seventeen, they said with pride, and when her grandmother came up to visit her the grandmother slept and ate and gossiped with the family too, but whether she too was expected to clean and cook I do not know.

It was less a city block than a village, where of a hot summer evening the men sat out on the front porches in shirtsleeves smoking cigars and reading newspapers under yellow lanterns (there were seven New York City newspapers) while the wives brought out bowls of cherries and trays of watermelon slices and gossiped porch to porch, and we girls listened huddled together on the steps, hoping the parents would forget us and not send us to bed, and where one lambent starry summer evening the singular fighting couple on the block had one of their famous battles in the master bedroom—shrieks and blows and crashing furniture; in what was to become known in local legend as the balcony scene, Mrs. Hochman leaned out of the open second-floor casement window in a flowing white nightgown like a mythological bird and shouted to the assembled throng, “Neighbors, neighbors, help me, I’m trapped up here with a madman” (she was an elocution teacher), and my mother rose to her feet to go and help but my father, a tax lawyer, restrained her and said, “Leave them alone, they’re both crazy. Tomorrow they’ll be out on the street holding hands as usual.” And soon, indeed, the fighting stopped, and I wondered, What is love, what is marriage? What is reality in the rest of the world?

The daughters of families of our station in life took piano lessons and I took the piano lessons seriously. Besides books, music was the only experience capable of levitating me away from Brooklyn without the risk of crossing bridges or tunneling my way out. When I was about eleven I said I wanted a new and good piano teacher, for the lady on Eastern Parkway to whose antimacassared apartment I went for my lessons was pixilated: she trilled a greeting when she opened the door and wore pastel-colored satin ribbons in her curly gray hair and served tea and excellent shortbread cookies, but of teaching she did very little. So my mother got me Mr. Simmons.

He was a black man of around thirty-five or forty recommended by a business acquaintance of my father’s with a son allegedly possessed of musical genius, the development of which was being entrusted to Mr. Simmons. If he was good enough for that boy, the logic ran, then he was good enough for me. I was alleged to be unusually gifted too, but not quite that gifted. I thought it very advanced of my parents to hire a black piano teacher for their nearly nubile daughter; somewhere in the vast landscape of what I had yet to learn, I must have glimpsed the springs of fear. I was proud of my parents, though I never said so. I had known they were not bigoted but rather instinctively decent; I had known that when and if called upon they would instinctively practice what was then urged as “tolerance,” but I hadn’t known to what degree. As children do, I underestimated them, partly because I was just discovering that they were the middle class.

Mr. Simmons was a dark-skinned man of moderate height and moderate build, clean-shaven but with an extremely rough beard that might have been a trial to him, given his overall neatness. A schoolteacher, married, the father of two young children, he dressed in the style of the day, suit and tie, with impeccable conventionality. His manners were also impeccably conventional. Nice but dull was how I classified him on first acquaintance, and I assumed from his demeanor that moderation in all things was his hallmark. I was mistaken: he was a blatant romantic. His teaching style was a somber intensity streaked by delicious flashes of joviality. He had a broad smile, big teeth, a thunderous laugh, and a willing capacity to be amused, especially by me. To be found amusing was an inspiration. I saved my most sophisticated attitudes and phraseology for Mr. Simmons. Elsewhere, I felt, they were as pearls cast before swine. He was not dull after all, if he could appreciate me. And yet unlike my past teachers he could proclaim “Awful!” with as much intrepidity as “Beautiful!” “No, no, no,
this
is how it should sound,” in a pained voice, shunting me off the piano bench and launching out at the passage. I was easily offended and found his bluntness immodest at first. Gradually, through Mr. Simmons, I learned that false modesty is useless and that true devotion to skill is impersonal.

Early in our acquaintance he told me that during the summers when school was out his great pleasure was to play the piano eight hours in a row, stripped to the waist and sweating. It was January when he said this, and he grinned with a kind of patient longing. I recognized it as an image of passion and dedication, and forever after, in my eyes, he was surrounded by a steady, luminous aura of fervor. I wished I were one of his children, for the glory of living in his house and seeing that image in the flesh and basking in the luxuriant music. He would be playing Brahms, naturally; he had told me even earlier on that Brahms was his favorite composer. “Ah, Brahms,” he would sigh, leaning back in his chair near the piano bench and tilting his head in a dreamy way. I did not share his love for Brahms but Brahms definitely fit in with the entire picture—the hot day, the long hours, the bare chest, and the sweat.

Mr. Simmons had enormous beautiful pianist’s hands—they made me ashamed of my own, small and stubby. Tragicomically, he would lift one of my hands from the keyboard and stare at it ruefully. “Ah, if only these were bigger!” A joke, but he meant it. He played well but a bit too romantically for my tastes. Of course he grasped my tastes thoroughly and would sometimes exaggerate his playing to tease me, and exaggerate also the way he swayed back and forth at the piano, crooning along with the melody, bending picturesquely over a delicate phrase, clattering at a turbulent passage, his whole upper body tense and filled with the music. “You think that’s too schmaltzy, don’t you?” laughing his thunderous laugh. The way he pronounced “schmaltzy,” our word, not his, I found very droll. To admonish me when I was lazy he would say,
“Play
the notes,
play
the notes,” and for a long time I had no idea what he meant. Listening to him play, I came to understand. He meant play them rather than simply touch them. Press them down and make contact. Give them their full value. Give them yourself.