Strivers Row (37 page)

He would lean over to Malcolm in the cab of the gasping truck, as if he did not quite dare to say it aloud, even here. The aggressive jolliness vanishing from his voice for once. His face angry, but baffled as well—even helpless.

“They're killing them all, you know.”

“Who?”

“The
Jews,
that's who. Don'tch you read the papers? Wherever those scum go, they're killin' any Jew they can get their hands on. Burning the bodies in ovens!
It's true!
They're trying to wipe out the whole people. As if they never existed!”

Malcolm felt uneasy around the boy nonetheless, and even more uneasy when Jakey talked like that, reminding him of the books back in his room.
A people invisible can easily be made to disappear.
He began to stop by Mendelssohn's less often, telling Jakey that he was busy with the policy.

It wasn't altogether untrue. He had been working more, still hoping to see Miranda, almost the one person he hadn't seen since starting his slave for West Indian Archie. He had taken to betting still more of his own earnings, even five and ten dollars a day now. Determined to hit a big score so that he could at least buy a car to take her out in, or maybe even a club of her own where she could sing. Betting always on a combination of the number
Aunt Dinah's
dream book gave for her name—
Miranda: 544
.

Before he could hit, though—or buy a car, or a club—he saw her again. It was on a Friday when he went up to pay off to Archie at Fat Man's Bar, which was situated right along Coogan's Bluff, overlooking the Polo Grounds. He had walked in, and there she was, right in front of him. She was sitting alone in a booth at the back, by a window that overlooked the great horseshoe curve of the baseball stadium below. An untouched drink in front of her, wearing a yellow dress that almost seemed to match the color of the woozy evening sunlight pouring through the window.

He knew Archie liked the booth because he could look down the length of the bar and keep an eye on everybody who came in, but she still didn't see him approach. Staring absently at the wall instead, her arms pulled close around herself despite the warm August day, idly kicking one foot, as if she were a schoolgirl. Malcolm had walked up to her before she was aware of him, ignoring all the heads that he could see swiveling around at the bar as he went past.

“I want to see you again,” he said to her, even as she started to look up, still not sure of who it was. Trying to keep his voice from rising as he repeated:

“I want to see you again. I know you want to see me—”

“Go away, you child.”

“I'm serious—”

“He's here, you know,” she told him. “He just stepped around back with the owner, he'll be right here.”

Her voice low and conversational, for any ears straining to listen. Smiling a friendly, false smile, extending her hand to him. He took the opportunity to touch her. Holding her hand gently in both of his, not letting it go—marveling at its smallness, the smoothness of her skin. She let him hold on to it, while her eyes slowly rose to meet his again. Malcolm translating everything around him ecstatically into numbers, the way he did compulsively now. The sun coming through the window,
777
. The drink on the table before her,
066
. Her skin, her eyes, her small hand,
Miranda, 544—

“I don't care. I'll tell him right to his face!”

“No, you won't,” she said firmly, extricating her hand at last. “You won't do any such foolish thing.”

But he had kept after her, relentless as he always was when he had some idea in his head. Finding excuses to meet Archie nearly every evening after that, at Connie's Inn, or Barron's, or the Golden Grill, up by the George Washington Bridge, whenever he knew she would be with him. Speaking to her when he left them alone for so much as a moment to do some business.

“Tell me again—why is it you love me so much?” she asked him at last.

“I tol' you already, baby. You know, sugar, I love you like he could never love you—”

“No,” she stopped him. “Look at me, and tell me what you see. Tell me why you love me.”

“All right,” he said, forced to tell her then. Fumbling over the words, feeling the perspiration coursing down his back, adding to his discomfort.

“All right. You're the most beautiful girl I ever seen,” he told her truthfully. “I never met anybody like you. I just like to watch you. I like how you move, an' how you smell all the time...”

His voice trailed off, and he looked away then.

“Yes?” she pressed him. “Look at me!”

“I like—I like how you make me as good as anybody. I like how I don't have to feel bad around you. I can trust you, too. I want to look out for you, an' take care of you. The way you look out for me—”

He stopped abruptly and raised his eyes again to look at her, mortified by how much he had said. But he saw that she was looking at him intently, her large gray eyes glistening.

“Is that what you think of me?” she breathed. “That's what you see when you look at me, someone that good, and kind?”

“That's the way you are—” he started to say, but she stopped him, placing a hand on one of his.

“Listen here,” she said, looking quickly toward the back of the bar where Archie had gone to collect his latest payment—then pulling a small pad and an eyebrow pencil out of her purse, scribbling down a number.

“Call me Friday afternoon, and I'll tell you where to meet me.”

He nodded dumbly as he took the little slip of white paper, unable to believe he finally had her number in his hand.

“One thing. Tell me one thing,” he had managed to get out anyway.

“What?” she asked hurriedly—already cool again, looking past him to the spot where West Indian Archie might appear again at any moment.

“What do you see when you look at me?” he asked, and in answer she raised one hand, and placed it on his lips.

“A beautiful boy,” she said. “A beautiful, beautiful boy.”

He had found out just what he was during that same spring he was elected president of his eighth-grade year. That year that any lingering misapprehensions cleared up for him, once and for all.

Just the month after he had been elected, Mr. Kaminska announced they would have their evaluations, and career counseling. He had drawn a rocket ship and stars and a moon in one corner of the blackboard, and written the words “Shoot for the Stars!” underneath it. Telling his homeroom class they didn't have to worry, that it wasn't a test. He was just going to go over their grades, and talk with them each privately about what their aspirations were, so they would know what classes to take when they went over to Mason High School in the fall. He warned all of them, though, to think big.

“Think about success in life,” he told them over and over. “You're not too young. Think about what it is that you want to be a success at in life—and what you need to do to get it.”

Malcolm had been excited when the day came, and his excitement grew as all of them waited in the school auditorium for what Mr. Kaminska would tell them. He was still in the top three of the class, along with Jimmy Cotton and Audrey Slaugh. He had stared at that drawing of the rocket ship, and the stars and the moon for weeks, and prepared for the best feeling of his life—what Mr. Kaminska would tell him he could be once he looked over his record.

The whole day, other boys and girls from his class had trickled back into the auditorium, looking pleased or thoughtful, or at worst a little puzzled. From what Malcolm could pick up, Mr. Kaminska had asked them all what they wanted to be more than anything else in the world—then told them that they could do it, or better. He had told students who had much lower marks than Malcolm's that they could be teachers or veterinarians, nurses or county agents. He told those who had no bigger plans than to go work on their family's farm, or in the store, of the city careers they might have, and of which they had never so much as thought before.

They giggled and joked about it, but Malcolm could see the excitement in their eyes, most of them having been told something that they had never really considered before, whole new worlds opening up before them. When it was his turn, he had walked down the hall and into the classroom almost jubilantly—thinking of his high marks, and all the nice notes Mr. Kaminska had sent home to Ma Swerlein. Anticipating already the moment when he would ask him what he wanted to be, and ready with an answer.

He was sitting with Malcolm's school record laid out before him when the boy came into the room. Mr. Kaminska's thick-chested, football player's body dwarfing the desk—giving Malcolm his brisk, perfunctory coach's smile beneath his moustache as he motioned him into a chair in front of the desk. He had sat down with a nervous grin, trying to steal a look at all the papers in front of Mr. Kaminska. Never having imagined that there would be so much of a file—both fascinated and a little unnerved that anyone would keep such close track of him.

“Well, Malcolm. Have you thought about a career?” Mr. Kaminska asked him.

Right away, Malcolm was taken aback by the perfunctory tone in which he asked the question.
Of course he had been thinking about a career. That was the whole point of this, wasn't it?
But he had gone ahead and given the answer he had prepared, confident that Mr. Kaminska would be impressed once he heard him out.

“Yessir. I been thinkin' I'd like to be a lawyer,” Malcolm told him, smiling proudly. But when he did, Mr. Kaminska only dropped his eyes to the desk.

“Malcolm, the first step in finding success in life is for us to be realistic,” he said, looking at him sternly. As he spoke he gathered up all of the papers, the grades and reports spread out on his desk before him—shoveling them back into Malcolm's folder and flipping it closed.

“Don't misunderstand me now,” he said. “All of us here like you. You know that. But a lawyer? That's simply not a realistic goal for a colored boy. You need to think about something you can be. For instance, I know you're very good with your hands. Everybody admires your work in carpentry shop, it says so right here—”

He glanced down at the closed folder, looking quickly up again.

“Why don't you think about carpentry? People around here like you so much, you'll get all kinds of work. I'm sure of it.”

The whole time Mr. Kaminska had been talking, Malcolm had felt himself sinking. Floundering in the teacher's words, wanting to stop up his mouth as they kept pouring out. Wanting to ask Mr. Kaminska about what had happened to the rocket ship, and the crescent moon, and shooting for the stars.

He had gotten up from his chair and gone out of the room in a daze, without saying another word to Mr. Kaminska—even while the teacher was still making notations on a chart, saying something about signing Malcolm up for a vocational curriculum. He walked back out the door, and down the hall to the auditorium—the teacher's smooth, authoritative voice still trailing after him, unperturbed—and after that he thought that he hadn't really known anything, that he was seeing everyone and everything around him for the first time.

He could barely stand to be in Mr. Kaminska's homeroom anymore, barely bothered to pay attention in the class. Audrey Slaugh and Jim Cotton, the other smart kids, had tried to encourage him and make him forget what he had been told, but he couldn't stand to have anything to do with them, either. He quit the debating society and the basketball team. He quit his job washing up and dancing at the restaurant downtown, going straight up to his room after school and only coming out for dinner.

“What's wrong, Malcolm? Won't you tell me what it is?” Mrs. Swerlein had asked, noticing the change in him. Putting her fleshy arms around him when he came in the door, in a hug that would once have made him as hard as a log.

But he could no longer bear the touch of her on him. He wanted to ask her if that was what she thought he should do, too—become a local carpenter, a handyman, begging white people for work. But not daring to, he ran up to his room instead, reading again and again the comic books he had read over so many times already. No longer proud of anything he had—being class president, or the one boy in the juvenile home allowed to have the run of the town—but wanting now only to possess a secret, unsuspected identity of his own, so he could sneak off and disappear.

He never went out after that except to the school dances. For most of them, all they had was the school record player, scratching out Glenn Miller's “Moonlight Serenade,” or the Inkspots' “If I Didn't Care.” But Malcolm loved seeing the old scarred gym transformed—the bleachers and the backboards covered with Japanese lanterns, and the paper cutouts of palm trees and silver moons they had all made in art class. He liked to stand shyly back by the wall on the boys' side, and watch the other kids shuffle around stolidly on the gym floor, stealing covert glances at the girls he liked. He had finally worked up the nerve to go over and ask one of them to dance—only to have the other boys suddenly surround him, heading him off before he got halfway across the court to the girls' side of the floor. They smiled at him, shoving at him playfully, forcing him gently back to their side. Telling him confidentially,
“C'mon, Malcolm. You don't wanna dance with any of those girls. Let's go outside an' steal a smoke—”
until he got the point, and spent the rest of that evening and all the others pacing slowly back and forth between the punch bowl and the refreshment table, or working the record player while the rest of them danced.

For the last dance of the year, though, they had brought a band in all the way from Lansing. The teacher chaperones nervously hanging back, watching the kids swing out on the floor. Everyone so wrapped up in the music that the other boys didn't look for him until he had made his way over to the girls' side. Wearing the beautiful apple green suit he had bought from the store downtown with his earnings, asking each of the girls, one after another, for the next dance as they came off the floor. They all refused, looking around, as if confused to even be asked such a thing by the likes of him. Malcolm had begun to run through them, trying to dodge the other boys as they began to close in around him—scurrying over beside the band, when he saw the chaperones approach.