Strivers Row (36 page)

But nailed to the front door he made out a crude hand-printed sign reading
This is a Ghost House
—and as he moved closer he saw a preternaturally white face begin to emerge from the ground, just to the side of the front staircase. He kept watching as he emerged—a very old man, Malcolm thought, dressed in an odd suit, black as an undertaker's, with a high, detachable collar, and towing a wooden box behind him on a rope. He had a drooping gray moustache, with long gray hair and sideburns, and a face that was as white as any ghost's—as white as chalk, or sour cream, or even beyond white itself. It was more the pure
absence
of the color white, the white of a slug, as if he had been shut away somewhere sunless for many years, and drained of everything—blood, warmth, humor, sustenance.

The man's wooden box scraped gratingly along the sidewalk, echoing down the quiet street and startling Malcolm out of his reverie. He watched as the man climbed up the brownstone steps to the door, where he tugged ineffectually at the sign that had been nailed there. Waving his arms about crazily—then gesturing to
him
.

“Young man! Young man!” he called out peremptorily, his voice nearly as grating as his box, with its nasal, honking, white man's inflection.

“Young man, will you come here and help me take this sign down? More of your young vandals have put it on my door again!”

Malcolm found himself climbing slowly up the brownstone steps— the stone crumbling like coffee cake beneath his shoes, wondering if it would collapse completely under his weight.

“Come, come, now!” the old man told him, wagging his finger at the offending sign.

Malcolm pulled at the shingle of wood and it tore away easily, leaving the nail in the door. The old white man leaned over, examining it and tsking. Not knowing what else to do with the sign, Malcolm handed it to him, and the man gave him a faint half bow.

“Thank you, sir!” he said politely. “These hooligans think it is amusing, to call us ghosts. But as you can see, we're far from ghosts! We're very much alive!”

The ghosty man rattled on, Malcolm staring at him under the dim light from the streetlamp. The man had keen blue eyes—the only color in his face—and to Malcolm's surprise he smelled of oranges instead of the usual, musty, old man's scent.

“Well, then. Good day, sir!” he said as abruptly as he had ordered Malcolm up his stoop.

He tucked the sign carefully into the top of his box, as if to preserve it for some future use, then proceeded back down the steps. Disappearing back into the hole Malcolm had seen him emerge from, the sound of an iron gate slamming shut behind him. Belatedly, Malcolm jumped down off the steps himself, and looked to see where the old ghosty man had gone. But all he could discern was the locked gate and a small door beneath the steps—the faint sounds of a box dragging along a wooden floor inside, echoing back to him.

“Langley Collyer. He an' his brother been there forever,” Jakey Mendelssohn had told him when Malcolm asked him about the ghosty man.

“He walks around at night like some kinda
dybbuk
. Always to Hyman Schwartz's butcher shop, to ask for chuck chop an' old bones. He tells Schwartz he got no money. I tell him, ‘Hyman, he got plenty, he's just cheap.' But Hyman gives it to him anyway. He just likes to listen to him talk. He used to say he could listen to Langley for hours, even if he couldn't understand the half a what he was sayin'.”

“There's a brother?”

“Sure.
Nobody
ever sees him anymore. Who knows? He coulda killed him in there, nobody'd know the difference. He coulda killed an'
ate
him, nobody would know. This is the kind of City we live in now.”

Malcolm had first met Jakey when he went into his shabby, over-stuffed department store on West 144th Street, looking to buy some cheap, conservative suit for his slave waiting tables at Small's. It was the sort of store he and Jarvis never would have been caught dead in, back in Boston—full of bolts of uncut, chintzy-looking cloth, overflowing their shelves. The whole place drowning in dust, with big
Sale! One Time Only!
signs sticking out of every bin. It smelled of staleness, and roaches, and old food, which reminded him of their house back in Lansing when everything was falling apart, and it had made him want to run out of the store as soon as he set foot inside.

But Jakey Mendelssohn had come bustling right over to him, as if he were a prized customer. Dragging one leg a little behind him, talking to him right from the start in a confiding, fatherly manner. Within minutes he had told Malcolm his name, and shared a joke. Pulling him over to the clothes department—really just a wider niche on the department store's one floor—along with an older, colored man who had immediately whipped out a tape to take his measure.

“You see? This is what you want in a suit,” he had told Malcolm as his tailor chalked his pants. Holding up a jacket sleeve to show him the lapels and the pants legs, as if they were the finest goods.

“See? This won't ever wear through. I don' care what you do in it, wash windows or scrub floors. Look at that stitching! Button up all the buttons. See how it hangs on you? This is how you tell a real suit.”

What he had sold him really wasn't bad for the price, even if it was so boxy and conservative that Malcolm was embarrassed to see himself in it. But he had been intrigued by how much Jakey knew about suits, and the other things that he could teach him as well. Once he had the slave with Archie, Malcolm stopped by his store every day, and Jakey would put a dollar down on a combination, and teach him how to buy and sell food coupons, and other black-market items. He even paid him to help with the bootleg-whiskey business he ran out of the back of his store. He would go all around Harlem, picking up the bonded whiskey bottles that bars had saved illegally, telling the State Liquor Authority they had been broken or stolen. Then, on nights when Malcolm didn't have collections to make, he would have him drive them far out into the Long Island countryside, where Jakey's connections had a still.

“Don' worry, it's foolproof,” he would tell Malcolm as they climbed into his tired, prewar truck, with
MENDELSSOHN'S
painted on the side. Piling those musty carpets, so ugly that no one had bought them even on layaway, in over the bottles.

“Some cop looks under the carpets, we tell 'em we're just takin' the empties out to the liquor authority on Long Island. The way back, we tell 'em we're just deliverin' real liquor. Here, take this just in case,” he added, handing him a snub-nosed .45.

“What?” Malcolm balked.

“It's all right, trust me. I got the gun registered in my name. Here, you just shove it in your pants, like so,” he said, demonstrating to Malcolm with his own .45.

“Make sure the safety's on! Anybody stops us, you just let it slide down through your pants, I tell 'em it's my gun. Anyway, the main thing we gotta worry about is highjackers, not cops.”

Malcolm would always take the wheel, Jakey never having learned to drive. He liked it just as well that way—liked sitting up in the high cab seats, the truck droning arthritically down the West Side Highway in the moonlight, past all the ships of war anchored out in the Hudson. Then all the way through Brooklyn, past the endless, churning docks and factories still filled with men, and activity, at every hour of the night.

Jakey ate fresh doughnuts, and gulped down coffee he had brought in a gleaming silver thermos. Getting more and more animated as they drove, talking constantly about whatever was on his mind.

“You know what I hate?” he would tell him. “I hate any hebe who changes his name. They say they gotta do it for show business, to get ahead—I don' buy it! For me, it's like colored people who pass. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Malcolm told him from behind the wheel, unsurprised by his conversation. He had never met a white person yet who could keep himself from talking about race within two minutes of meeting him. He kept his eye on the broken white lines, shining faintly in the dimmed-out highway lights, wondering where this was going.
Thinking of that colored minister he had seen. Passing in that store, and what did that mean—

“Take me. I'm only half Jewish. You didn't know that about me, did ya? Not with this
punim
. Sure, my old man's a Mick. Name a Feeley. Honest to God! Three months after I'm born, he goes out for a pack of cigarettes an' the evening paper an' never comes back.
Louse!
”

He chuckled humorlessly, and spat out the window.

“So I took her name. What'm I gonna do, take the name a some bastard who don' even have the guts to stay around an' support his family? Point is, I don' even have to be a Jew, but I am. You see what I'm sayin'? I'm proud to be what I am. You proud to be what you are, Red?”

“Uh-huh,” Malcolm said, still keeping his eyes on the road. Not sure what he should say.

“You know, we're in the same boat, Red. I'm a Jew an' you're colored,” Jakey said, clapping him familiarly on the knee. “These
goyim
don' like either one of us. If the Jew wasn't smarter than the
goyim,
we'd get treated even worse than your people!”

Malcolm tensed under the feel of his hand, and Jakey stopped then, sensing that he had said something wrong. But at that moment they passed through the last of Brooklyn, the last blocks of workers' rowhouses and tenements. Driving out under the stars now, past little clusters of towns, and through entire forests. Everything else around them pitch-black, so that Malcolm felt as if they might as well be on a boat, making their way out over the water.

They drove on past open fields of cabbages, and potatoes, until Jakey had him stop at what seemed like an arbitrary clump of trees. Malcolm thought maybe he just wanted to take a leak, but right away a pair of white men emerged from the trees. They were dressed in farmers' overalls and old, soft caps; hauling a large copper vat of sloshing liquid between them, grinning up at them in the truck as if they were in on some grand school prank.

Jakey got down and opened up the back door of the truck, and they all spent the next two hours funneling the gallons of homemade whiskey into the bonded bottles. When they were done Jakey paid them off, and the farmers handed them little tin cups to scoop out the last amber dregs—sharing a little toast to the night's work, though Malcolm had everything he could do to keep from gagging on the harsh liquor.

“Damn! You could get better king kong back in Harlem,” he told Jakey, in front of the still grinning farmers.

“Whattaya talk?” Jakey asked him with a wink. “This is scotch,
boychik
. The
goyim
can't tell the difference, you put in enough soda, enough ice, serve it late enough in the evening. Just so long's they see it comin' out of their favorite label.”

He liked the Jew store owner, despite the things he said sometimes— his attempts to make out that it was he and Malcolm against the rest of the white people of the world. He was always probing, he thought, trying to find out about Malcolm's family, where he was from, but he laid off when he saw that Malcolm wouldn't talk. He would peel off fifty bucks for him after one of their perambulations, stand him to a meal of fresh-killed chicken at Jimmy's, or a steak at the grill at Wells' Restaurant—the two of them nearly dizzy with fatigue, but content with the night's work.

Sometimes he would even take him back to his apartment, over in East Harlem, for a meal with his mother, Sadie. A round, jolly little woman who liked to bring her knitting and sit outside her son's store in a frayed beach chair on days that weren't rainy or too hot. Shrugging her shoulders and replying with a martyred
“Pushing along. Pushing along”
whenever he asked her how she was. When they'd had a couple glasses of the awful, sweet wine they always served, Jakey would press her to tell the story of how she survived the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. The old woman demurring at first, her eyes even filling with tears.

“That was a terrible thing, Jacob. So many girls died in that fire. My best friend, Esse—”

“But she
lived!
” Jakey would insist, his eyes shining with a strange, fierce pride, hugging her to him. “My
mamaleh
lived through the whole fire. All these poor girls killed, jumpin' out the windows 'cause the Irish
goniffs
who run the fire department didn't have ladders to reach. But she goes right down the elevator cable!”

“I had to,” she explained, shrugging again. Smiling sadly and patting the head of her son, who still had his arm around her shoulders.

“The elevator went down, an' I knew it wasn't coming back up. It didn't work so good in the best of times. So I thought, all right, I'm not going to die waiting for an elevator. I wrapped my hands up in rags an' slid down.”

“Nine stories!” Jakey said triumphantly. “The whole nine stories! It nearly cuts right through her hands, but she made it! That's how they met, it was my old man who found her, passed out on the roof of the elevator car. Nearly drowning in the water from their hoses but alive, goddammit!”

“Jacob!”

The two of them smiled at each other, Jakey hugging her close again, and Malcolm smiled, too. He liked Sadie, she had kind eyes, and spoke to him as she did to anyone else. It was the other person at the table, Jakey's cousin from Europe, who gave Malcolm the willies. The boy almost never spoke. Furtively watching them all when he thought he wasn't being watched, his cow eyes staring fearfully out of his blocky, freckled, pale Germanic face. Jakey talked about him, too, as he talked about everything else on their rides out to the potato fields, but more seriously, as if it were really eating at him.

“You gotta understand, the things he saw over there. Those sons of bitches!”