Strivers Row (29 page)

Those had been times of constant crisis. A whole Hooverville of unemployed men, living within a stone's throw of the church on abandoned East River barges. People growing potatoes in buckets of earth on their fire escapes, fertilizing them with manure they fought for from the street vendors' horses. More than half the doctors on work relief, college professors driving taxicabs for a living.

And still they kept coming. More and more of them, crowding in every week. Some of them from the Islands, but more from the South. Piling into the tenements just around the corner on 142nd and 143rd Streets, a dozen—two dozen—to an apartment. Arriving without a nickel, without any idea of how to live in the City, just like the original congregation his father had brought north.
People so ignorant they seemed like they had just come up from the earth.

There was nothing for them. Men sitting all day in employment-agency waiting rooms just for the warmth and the company, with no hope of a job, cashing monthly relief checks of fourteen dollars. The women up at the Slave Market in the Bronx, or working the presses in some laundry for all of twelve hours a week—even the streetwalkers working The Market on Seventh Avenue, with no takers. People everywhere, just standing around on the street corners
waiting,
the panic showing in their faces.

It had been better then
—at least for himself, he had to admit. There had been no time to think about anything. He had been busy simply helping people, all the time. So bone tired he could have fallen asleep every night as soon as his head hit the pillow. But somehow he had not, always finding the energy, then, to make love with Amanda, or just talk to her for hours. Starting refreshed the next morning no matter how late he had been up, it seemed—buoyed by the knowledge that he had done all that he could to help his hungry, suffering congregation.
Oh, how much easier he had lived then, amidst all the misery of his people!
No trying to find ways to occupy himself with endless committee meetings.

Our selfishness is unlimited—

By the time he looked up again, it was almost three. His work done for now, at least. All his comfortable boredom falling away, for the growing excitement and anxiety that he always felt on one of
those
days.

He leaned out of his inner office to tell his secretary that he was going out on his rounds, that she should go to lunch—then stepped back inside. Waiting while Delphine, an almost fanatically efficient woman in her fifties, with eyeglasses as thick as the sanctuary's stained glass, quietly gathered up her purse and her typing for home, and limped slowly out of the vestry on her fallen arches.

Only then did he dial up the familiar number in the Village. Almost holding his breath as he did so, unsure if he wanted her to answer or not. After seven rings he was about to hang up when he heard the receiver click, and there was her voice again—languid and smooth, and faintly mocking.

“Yes.”

A statement. But he still insisted on talking to her like regular people.
Like the regular people they had been.

“So, is it good for today, then?” he said breezily.

“Sure.”

The voice sweet and slow as molasses. A stage voice.

“Just as I said. Five o'clock.”

“All right, then—”

“That should give you enough time, shouldn't it?”

“What? Whatever you mean—” he started to say, sputtering ineffectually at her clairvoyance.

How does she know?
Ultimately, though, he couldn't even bring himself to deny it, simply huffing over the line—

“Five o'clock then!”

“I'll be here—”

—and jamming down the receiver before she could finish the last, drawn-out word. Gathering himself, he shot the cuffs on his light blue linen suit, then looked at his face in the mirror of his office bathroom. He peered at it over and over again, from every angle. Pushing back a particularly curly hair or two, trying to be sure of how it looked in the light. Trying to ignore the first heavy rumbles of his father's footsteps, along the floor just above him.

He always made the change in a place on Third Avenue. One of those little stores tucked away under the el, where they sold cigars and newspapers, and girlie magazines out of the back, and where he could slip in and slip out again without anyone noticing his transformation. It was a ritual by now, and one that made him feel more nervous and excited the closer he got to it. He imagined that this was how other men must feel going to buy dope, or liquor, or dirty postcards.

It was the same routine, every time, beginning when he left the New Jerusalem. Walking down to the train at 125th Street. Going out of his way to say hello to anyone he knew, making sure to wear his clerical collar. Bristling underneath it with the thrill, and the utter degradation, of what he was about to do to himself.

By the time he reached the elevated, he could barely keep from running up the metal stairs to the miniature Swiss chalet that served as a waiting room. There he waited back in the shadows, behind the old potbellied stove and the hurricane lamps still hanging from the ceiling. Emerging only when the ancient electric train, nearly as flimsy as a Christmas toy, came shambling into the station. Boarding always on the last of its four cars, sliding quickly onto the woven straw seat by the window.

It was only on the train that he took off the collar. Stealing one more look around to make sure there was no one he knew onboard, no one from his congregation whom he might have missed on the platform. Then he would unbutton it, and slip on the plain, conservative tie he had made sure to stuff into a jacket pocket that morning, as quickly as he could. Yanking down the window and leaning back when he was finished, closing his eyes and letting what faint breezes the train generated blow in his face.

He would take the Third Avenue el down to the 68th Street station, opening his eyes from time to time only to make sure he knew where he was. Staring dully into the reddened faces of the Irish housewives, and the old men who leaned their elbows out on the window ledges of their Lexington Avenue tenements, knocking out their pipes. When he reached his stop, he trotted quickly down the steps, into the dappled, grey half-light beneath the elevated.

It was another world down there, below the trains—a mid-town world of dappled light, and blue-winged pigeons nesting in the rusting latticed ironwork. The blocks in its shadow were full of secondhand stores and pawnshops, of foreign-language movie houses and flophouses, and leaning three- and four-story brick tenements. It was a world of the shrugged off, and the neglected, and the faintly shameful.
A world to disappear into.

Sometimes he would find a bar. One of the faceless Paddy dives, with perfunctory names like The Blarney Stone or The Jaunting Car. A jar of pickled eggs on the bar and a soaked-in reek of beer, and bad whiskey, and corned beef from the hot plate in the back. There he could easily slip into the squalid booth of a men's room, and emerge a new man. Bars were volatile places, though, and since the start of the war they had been filled with drunken servicemen, many of them angry over having already blown their pay, or been cheated out of it.
He had had about enough of that to last him a lifetime—

What he preferred were the newspaper shops. Deep slivers of stores, redolent of cigar smoke, and spilled malt liquor. There he would sidle past the men clustered around the front counter who were buying single cigarettes for a penny, arguing over the Giants or perusing the pink-tinted sheets of
PM,
or the
Mirror
and the
World-Telegram.
He would make his way to the very back of the store, where it was not unusual for men to dawdle among the tied piles of returned newspapers, or the well-thumbed stacks of sun-bathing magazines, with their photos of nude young women playing volleyball on the cover, leaping ecstatically in the sun.

There he would wait, pretending to peruse the magazines, or the boxes of five-cent cigars under the counter glass. Gearing himself up, remembering how he was going to walk, and talk, and deport himself. Preparing to think and act, and expect to be received
just

like one of them.
Only when he was sure he was in their mind would he straighten up, and fix his tie in the cigar-display glass. Ready to walk out onto the street a white man.

It was Sophia who had first taught him how to do it, one day out at Coney Island when he was still an adolescent and they were hurrying down the broad ramps from the train amidst the jostling, eager crowds. Drawn on helplessly by their first whiff of the sea, and the smell of frying red hots, and roasting corn.

She had dashed out in front of him. Her white cotton dress twirling in the same dappled half-light under the elevated tracks by Surf Avenue, grinning back at him—whispering into his ear when he caught up:

“Let's be white people today!”

He had thought even then, no more than a boy, that it wasn't right. But he had always been eager to please her.

“All right. But how?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“C'mon!”

She had grabbed his hand, and started to run again, pulling him down the boardwalk. The springy gray boards bouncing under their tennis shoes as she towed him along, instructing him in a close, low voice. Jonah barely able to listen, his head spinning from her nearness to him, the scent of the perfume on her neck.

He had always adored her—was often astonished to think that he might have such an older sister. He mocked her teenage laziness, was hurt sometimes when she casually swatted him away. But she was almost always kind to him—much kinder than the other older sisters he knew, always happy to show him or teach him new things.

And he had been stunned, and not a little embarrassed by how beautiful she had become in the last couple of years. Blushing just to look at the curves of her figure when she came downstairs in the morning, proud of the way her regal face and bearing awed into silence even his blustering school pals, who stood out by the stoop crudely ranking and snickering at every girl who walked by. When his sister Sophie came down, they were tongue-tied, embarrassed by the very fact of their abject maleness.

By that summer at Coney Island, she had already begun to change in other ways, he realized now. Something, some part of her becoming
elusive,
even mysterious. He would hear his parents talking about it sometimes when he came upon them in the kitchen, but he was still too young to understand. Sophie had started college by then, one of two colored women in her class up at Vassar. His parents proud as Iorians about it, his father always believing strongly in education for women.

But already she had started coming home less and less. Making excuses for why she couldn't leave her studies, or taking trips with her classmates. At first their parents had been glad—even prouder—to see that she fit in, his sister always a little too aloof and dreamy, even for her Harlem high school. Yet when his father, coming back from an upstate convocation, had stopped in Poughkeepsie one afternoon to see her, he hadn't been able to find her anywhere. He had looked all over the campus, always arriving too late to catch her in her dorm room, or in class, or at the library. Leaving, finally, with the distinct if unsubstantiated feeling, as he had told their mother, that she had been playing some sort of game with him.

Jonah hadn't thought anything of it. He had just assumed, much as he missed her, that she was a grown-up now and would be away more—off on her own, as he sometimes longed to be. When she did come home, he was amazed yet again by her sophistication, by how she dressed and talked and held herself, so much above the other girls and even the older women from the church. She wore evening dresses on occasion now, and jewelry and makeup. Some members of the church swore that they had seen her in downtown hotel bars, alone, smoking cigarettes out of a holder, though this charge had seemed so outrageous that his father hadn't even known how to confront her with it. At home she talked in her droll new college voice about taking up a career singing, or on the stage. Their parents rendered almost speechless by these ambitions, leaving them unchallenged only out of the fervent hope that she would soon understand their impossibility. To Jonah it had only seemed like the natural next step—his sister metamorphosing into something even more marvelous.

That summer, condescending to spend a few weeks at home with them, she had paid attention to him again. Passing most of her days sitting around the front parlor in a pair of sleek white trousers while leafing through copies of
Life,
or her movie magazines— reading material that made his father so angry when he saw them that his hands actually shook. Going out at night with some of the few friends she still had in the neighborhood to see the pictures at the Alhambra, or the Roosevelt. Or more often, he knew—listening to her high heels clicking quietly across the upstairs floorboards— sneaking out after their parents were asleep to go dancing.

But when she did stay in, she would talk to him. Giving him novels of which she knew their father would disapprove. Telling him all kinds of things about girls who had been expelled from college for going out to meet their boyfriends at night, or to buy bootleg liquor. Telling him the things that white college girls said about colored people when they weren't around, and what they really thought.

“But how do you
know
these things?” he exclaimed, jumping up on his mother's fine brocade parlor couch in his excitement.

“Let's just say I'm a good eavesdropper,” she had told him, with the mysterious little chuckle that all the boys liked so much.

That morning at Coney Island they had risen before six to make the endless subway ride from Harlem. Taking the B train at 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, then changing to the F at Herald Square, and riding it through all twenty-nine stops—on into the Village and through the Lower East Side, then cutting over to Brooklyn by the Navy Yard, and down through Gowanus, and Fort Hamilton.