Strivers Row (41 page)

It had all started by accident, when he went to the college upstate. Save for that one unsettling afternoon out at Coney Island, when his sister had told him
Let's be white people today!
he had never even thought to try to be something he wasn't.

The college was simply the best one he had been able to get into, a collection of imitation Gothic towers and dormitories, cloistered up in the Chenango Hills amidst rolling forests of pine and fir and cedar. His parents had been as proud of him as they had been of Sophie, with no qualms about its being a white school. Jonah had felt much the same way, eager to start the rest of his life, barely able to sit still through the trip. Traveling alone by train up to Utica through the brilliant early foliage of western New York, then by cab to the little village that ringed the college. He was giddily hauling his trunks up to his dorm room, everything around him so new and fresh and strange that he could barely keep from laughing out loud, when Howard Marsden had walked in.

“You must be Jonah,” he said at once, in the deep, warm voice that was so much a part of his charm. Introducing himself and snapping a hand out—then moving at once to pick up the other strap of the outsize steamer trunk Jonah had been scraping across the floor.

“What do we have here, a geology major?” Marsden had grinned at him—the grin alone, Jonah would always remember, easy and unforced and conspiratorial. Tucking the pipe he'd had in his teeth casually away in a jacket breast pocket, lifting the cumbersome trunk with an easy, one-handed grace—

“You know you don't have to bring your own rocks, old man, they already have plenty. What's the matter? Didn't they tell you?”

He started to chuckle—and Jonah realized how confused he must look, his mouth hanging half open. For the boy at the other end of his trunk was tall and lanky, with blue eyes and freckles, and limp flaxen hair that fell over one side of his forehead—and indisputably
white
.

“Um, I think there's a mistake,” Jonah had mumbled. “I think I must be in the wrong room—”

“No mistakes possible! Not at this institution of higher learning!” Marsden had beamed. “Room 413, right? You're Jonah Dove, aren't you?”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Jonah said, smiling back for the first time.

And for one moment he had thought that it really didn't matter. That he had come all this way into a new world—a world of the mind, where anything at all was possible. Where he might actually have a white roommate, and it wouldn't matter in the least, and no one would care what color he was.

How naive he had been,
he thought now. As if taking a train up through all those unfamiliar stops, Poughkeepsie and Albany, and Troy and Schenectady and Utica, should land him in a place where the world itself had changed. Having forgotten for the moment about that day at Coney Island, how easy it had been for him to pass with Sophie. Never having given it a thought, how quickly he had been able to hail a cab from Utica—the white hack even tipping his cap obsequiously, and rushing to help with his trunks.

Of course. For almost the first time in his life, he was in a place where no one
assumed
he was colored. That still didn't mean he
wasn't.

His delusion hadn't lasted long. For the rest of that day and night, even for the whole of his first week at the college, he had dared to think it just didn't matter. To this day, he could still remember how heady that week had felt.

Then slowly, little by little, the air had come out of it. There had been nothing very overt—nothing crude, or openly racist. Only the slow realization that came from the very way in which Howie Marsden had taken him so easily under his wing. How he'd introduced Jonah to all his own friends from prep school, or the many he had already made on campus, without the least hint of uneasiness. The way they had all responded to him, without any hesitation or embarrassment, like no encounters with white people he had ever had before.
The ready, good-hearted friendship of young men who felt themselves all to be both gods and equals, off on some great adventure together.

The last, incontrovertible piece of evidence was provided one evening when he was hurrying to evening prayers with Howie, and Jack Leonard, and Gilly Mackenzie, and Andy Miller—the other great new friends he had made through Howie Marsden—and they had seen, at a distance, a very tall, broad-shouldered freshman walking ahead of them to chapel.

“Merton Turnbow,” Howie had said, pointing him out to Jonah. Then adding, in a purely conversational tone, with absolutely no hidden meaning—

“He's one of about four colored boys we have on campus. They all live down in some rooms in the village.”

The boy in question had turned just then, looking behind him, almost as if he heard them. He was too far away for that to be possible, but even so Jonah had had to fight the urge to duck behind his friends. Afraid that somehow Turnbow would see him, noticing how Turnbow's skin was only a shade or two darker than his own—

“Yes, and every one of them a letterman in football,” Jack Leonard had added, smiling ruefully. “Real enlightened campus here, huh? The administration's just about out of the antebellum years.”

“Well, they're damned good football players,” Howie said, with a shrug and a little laugh. And in that moment Jonah knew they had mistaken him. That they were his friends not because they didn't care but because they didn't
know
.

It was in that moment, too, that Jonah had decided not to dis-abuse any of them. Wishing, even then, that he had someone to talk to about it, wanting to discuss it at least with his sister. He understood, in an instant, just how it was that Sophie had been able to get so close to the white girls at Vassar, and he would have liked to have known if she, too, had stumbled into it, seduced before she knew it by the promise of a friend.

But Sophie was gone again—off on one of her mysterious vanishings that would get longer and longer, until they finally culminated in her leaving their house, and the rest of the family altogether once their mother died. Jonah had no one to discuss anything with at all—just his new friends—and so he had let the moment pass, and bound himself inescapably to the lie.

Many times he suspected that they knew. There was one night when they had slipped out after curfew to a notorious local road-house, and a white co-ed they had brought along would not leave Jonah alone. She had hung on his every word, sliding her arms up around his neck and pulling him close to her when they danced. Just a short, plain-faced white co-ed in a sweater and skirt—so obviously smitten that it had become a subject of amusement to them all, exchanging humorous looks over her head, making little jokes when the rest of their dates couldn't hear them.

Eventually, though, it had come to annoy Jonah, and he had pulled himself away from the girl's embrace on the dance floor. Going out to sit in the open roadster Howard Marsden had parked by the side of the turnpike, and take a breather. Jonah telling himself he was not amused by their jokes—when in fact he had been all but overcome by the idea of seeing how far he could go with the little white girl, just because he could do it.

But when Jack Leonard had trailed him out a little while later, he had made a joke of it again. Shouting to him
“You have to get her off me!”
Jack had just laughed, and they had sat for a long time, smoking and talking in the roadster. A little tipsy from the crude, bootleg whiskey Howie had brought in his flask. Jonah in the front passenger seat with his legs propped up over the door, Jack in the back, both of them staring up at the stars in the open country sky.

Jack had always been the one of Howard's friends Jonah felt the most at ease with, the one he thought he might really have confided in. A stocky, serious sophomore, with black, slicked-down hair, and olive skin that looked darker than Jonah's in certain lights. Glad to get a laugh from him, Jonah had continued to riff on the girl, joking more and more about her until he finally turned around to face Jack where he sat, his head lolling, in the back of the car.

“Will you just tell her I'm
black
, so she'll back off ?” Jonah said, looking straight at him, even if he was grinning.

Jack Leonard had raised his head then, meeting his eye—and for a long moment they had stared at each other in what faint illumination the moon, and the lights from the roadhouse, had afforded. The smile was frozen on Jonah's face, but he was unable to squeeze another word out of his mouth. Waiting there for two, three beats—until Jack had begun to smile crookedly, too.

“That's it! Tell her I'm black!” He had been able to laugh then, the words coming out in a single whoosh of relief.

“You oughn't even to joke like that,” Jack had said mildly, still trying to smile at him. “You never know how something like that can go around.”

Jonah had laughed again, and then they were both laughing, and he had put his head back down on the top of the front seat. Laughing a little to himself until he had drifted off right there in the car and the others had come out and found him, still smiling up at the moon.

From that time on, he had made no effort to extricate himself. Reasoning that even if it all came to ruin tomorrow, at least he would have this day. He recognized that it was a young man's thinking— but even now, he relished every minute he had had.

He had done everything with them—and above all with Howie Marsden. Despite his gawky, boyish appearance, he was the most sophisticated person his age that Jonah had ever known. He wore tailored suits and brown tweed jackets, and he knew about girls and cars, and smoked a pipe. He made friends easily, and was liked by both professors and other students. Jonah just liked to hear him talk at night, when the lights were off and they were in their narrow, metal-framed beds across the dorm room from each other. Encouraging him to tell him anything he could think of—about his days at Andover, or his summers sailing out on the Finger Lakes or touring Europe, or any other part of the whole, wide world of Howard Marsden.

“But this must be a terrible bore for you, old man,” he would say at last, yawning loudly.

“No. No, it isn't,” Jonah would say softly, beneath the blankets in his own bed, trying his hardest not to appear too eager. “It's not a bore at all.”

“Tell me something about yourself.”

“Oh, tomorrow,” Jonah would say then, rolling over. “I'm barely awake.”

It was easy enough to keep them from pressing him on his own background. He had hinted only that his reluctance was due to an embarrassing lack of money, or social standing—amazed by his own deftness at it. The rest of them had duly left the subject alone. The closest any of them came to the truth was when they teased him for being so naive after having grown up in the City.

“How do you know that?” Jonah had said too quickly, the hackles going up on the back of his neck, and they had all grinned at him.

“Well, there is the way you talk, old boy—”

“You mean my accent?” he had wondered, realizing that he had never even thought about it. But to the rest he sounded hurt, and they were quick to try to cover it over.

“He must be the son of some Episcopal bishop,” Gilly Mackenzie had joked—and Jonah had looked down, smiling, and told them, “Well,
something
like that—” while they howled, and pounded him on the back.

“Oh, a minister's son! But it's
true
, isn't it?”

“He's probably never been kissed, lads!”

“Ne'er swich liqueur had passed his lips—before last Saturday night!”

It had been the perfect cover, reasoning that at least one of them was likely to have some impecunious, high-church cleric in the family, a distant uncle or cousin. Jonah had let them kid him, and make their assumptions—though he should have known, then, that there were other traces he had left behind. He was too absorbed with the other world opening up before him, for it
was
opening up, and so what if it wasn't
exactly
as himself that he was experiencing it?

During the week they studied together in the ponderous, gray library, made of rock deliberately acid-aged to resemble the stones of Oxford. Reading English literature and American history, and German philosophy, and Latin and Greek, and the mandatory Bible courses called things like Old Testament Times and The Mediterranean in the Age of Christ.

On Fridays and Saturdays they would take the roadster, or the battered, secondhand Dodge that Howard had found and tooled up for him after advising him to buy it for a song. Hitting the road-houses and the hidden, illicit taverns with co-eds, or girls from the village. Driving all the way into Utica or Syracuse when a top band was playing at the State Theater, or Loew's Bigtime Vaudeville. Dining at a good hotel restaurant, singing and laughing like madmen and nipping more bootleg whiskey that Howie had somehow obtained from somewhere. The next morning they would smirk at each other, sitting hungover in chapel, then go out to eat stacks of dollar pancakes in the village diner, and lionize their exploits from the night before.

And all the time, Howard was giving him useful, unobtrusive tips on how to dress, or what to say to girls, or how to talk to professors. Teaching him lessons so subtle that Jonah barely understood that he hadn't thought of them himself until much later on. He had even gotten Jonah to go out for the cross-country team with him and Andy Miller, and Jonah, who had never done anything more athletic than the occasional game of stickball in the street, found to his surprise that he loved the sport.

He wasn't fast enough to win a meet but he had endurance, an ability to dog the heels of the front-runner almost to the very end. He loved the longer, harder practice runs most of all. The sound of his own ragged breath, the feel of his heart pounding, all alone in the woods. Putting in ten miles a day, through the winding hill paths in back of the college. Sometimes he would pause there, at the peak of the path. Separated from his teammates, panting for breath but feeling stronger than he ever had before, his whole body galvanized. He would look back down over the gloomy, gray stones of the college on one side of the ridge, the gabled white, and brown, and red houses of the village on the other, and it would seem to him possible then that he really could get away with it forever. That he could even stay here, become a professor or a dean, or
something
, and never have to go back to any other life.