Strivers Row (42 page)

On Saturday afternoons, after their morning meets, they would go to the football game if the team was playing at home. Another lark—Howard and Gilly Mackenzie smuggling in flasks under their ridiculous, oversize raccoon coats. Yelling and cheering raucously, stirring up the whole rooting section just for the fun of it. Jonah laughing and cheering along with the rest of them—until the afternoon he caught Merton Turnbow staring up at them from the sideline, his big shoulders twisted around under the gladiatorial pads beneath his uniform jersey. He was not smiling, his brow creased with doubt, as if suspecting that he was being made fun of—

Which he would,
Jonah thought even at the time.
Which of course he would, listening for the thinly hidden insult, the barbed taunt—

Jonah always paid close attention to the four colored players— all of them far and away the best players on the team, he noticed to his chagrin. The other three were the fastest men on the field, fleet, elusive backs and flankers, playing positions of sheer physicality. Only Merton was different—a tight end on offense, a linebacker on defense. He ran the team, especially on defense, assessing where the play was likely to develop. Roaming all over the field from his linebacker position, looking like a Mayan warrior with his leather helmet tucked down tight over his grim face. Taking out the quarterback on one play, knocking down a pass or leveling the fullback on the next. When he played on offense he would lead crushing sweeps, his big, rangy body cutting down the defensive ends and the cornerbacks, one by one, as they tried to reach the ball carrier. Going out himself once or twice a game on a trick play to catch a pass, and then literally fighting his way down the field—holding off one tackler after another with brutal straight-arms, or churning right through them, his knees pounding like pistons into chests and throats.

That was as close as Jonah got to him, those Saturday afternoons in the stands, until the February of their freshman year. By then he had already gone home and come back from Christmas vacation, and was living almost wholly in a world of his own devising. His confidence growing, the overpowering, gut-clenching fear that had overtaken him at night in bed, or just sitting up in the library—the fear that he would inevitably be discovered—fading now. Looking back on that time later, he thought that at times he had no longer been fully aware that he was pretending at all.

His main preoccupation by then was getting a date for the college's winter carnival, the corny, gauzy pinnacle of its winter social season. All of his friends had brought in their dates from women's schools down near the City, or over in Massachusetts. They had offered freely to have a friend brought along for him, too, but he didn't dare go quite that far.

Instead, he had taken a village girl named Isabelle Brinckerhoff, the daughter of the white Baptist minister there. Howard Marsden had introduced him to her, supposedly as a joke because he was such a preacher's son but really, Jonah knew, because he thought she'd be perfect for him—a poised, quiet young woman, with long blond hair and green eyes, who on their fifth date had allowed Jonah to kiss her on the mouth.

Despite his lust he hadn't tried to go much further than that, sensing that it would be futile. Contenting himself with being welcomed into her house for Sunday dinner. A big meal, of steaming roast beef or chicken served just after services, just as they always had for the deacons and some of the church mothers, back on Strivers Row. Even the grace her minister father said before the meal was the same. It was clear that he liked Jonah, too. Pleased to have heard that he was the son of a minister—another trace that momentarily alarmed Jonah, although her father never did pry too much into his background, not wanting either his daughter or her beau to think he was pressing them.

They had taken their dates to all of the contrived collegiate merriment of the carnival. The toboggan races, and the ice-skating and ice-sailing competitions, and intramural hockey games played out in the open night air on Taylor Lake, where they gathered each spring for graduation. The lake frozen now to a deep, purple-black sheen, rimmed with torches and small bonfires where they stood watching the skaters stitching deftly back and forth. The domed sky filled with brittle white stars, infinitely more in number than the three or four blurred specks he ever saw in the City's firmament. The smiling faces of his friends red-hued in the torchlight, grinning knowingly at each other. And afterward there would be warm mugs of cocoa laced with butterscotch, and kisses stolen from Isabelle in the corners of the field house.

The last night of the carnival he had been on his way to meet her, and Howard, and the others at the grand cotillion. Trudging up the same steep path from the village he trained on during the cross-country season, the ground covered with a half foot of snow now instead of pine needles. He was a little short of breath in his hurry, and the hard going, his fingers and toes already numb with the cold. But he had paused to look down from the peak of the path again, when he got there. Gazing contentedly at the village and the college, laid out before him like matching picture postcards. The sound of the night's festivities already, faintly audible below. The pines and the stones and the gabled roofs were laden with snow, the windows glowing with the red and orange of fireplaces. The bare, black trees of the campus wrapped in tiny white Christmas tree lights that cut a path directly to the door of the gymnasium, where the cotillion would be held.

He could already anticipate all the good things that would transpire that night. The dancing, cheek to cheek against Isabelle's exquisitely soft face. More hurried kisses with her out back of the gym. Breathing in the faint hint of a scent she had surreptitiously put on after she left the house, smelling it on her neck and her breasts when he placed his head against her bosom. And after that— all the laughs, all the jokes and pranks, all the stolen drinks with his friends. All the good fellowship, the togetherness that would wind up with them arm over shoulder, swaying and singing their way back to the dormitory in their fine, stiff formal wear, a bunch of swells out on the town—

His reverie had been broken by the sound of someone coming up the path from the campus. He had started to descend, embarrassed to think that anyone might have caught him daydreaming there—when he saw that it was Merton Turnbow. Plowing his way up through the snow as if it were some other team's defensive backfield, but with his head lowered pensively, a stack of books cradled in one of his huge, steam-shovel hands. He looked up only when he was almost upon Jonah, standing mesmerized in the middle of the path. He had started to give a perfunctory nod, and push on—when he looked at Jonah again, and stopped right in front of him.

“Hello,” Jonah muttered, making as if to get on his way again. But Merton Turnbow stayed where he was, blocking his path. Looking him over frankly, even insultingly, until Jonah was unable to stay silent any longer.

“You're not going down to the dance? I'm sure you'd be welcomed—” he started to babble—but Turnbow cut him off.

“What do you think you're doing?”

“I was just saying—”

“I said,
what do you think you're doing?
” he only repeated, his voice cracking through the cold air. Making it clear that he was not about to consider moving until he got an answer to his question.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Jonah said, then reached out ludicrously with his right hand. “I'm Jonah Dove—”

“I know who you are.
‘I'm sure you'd be welcomed.'
Jesus jumped-up Christ. I was wondering how much you really believed this. Now I know.”

“You don't know anything about me,” Jonah said, defiant, though any pretense he had tried to maintain between them was gone now.

He tried to push past him, the big man's body as hard and unyielding as stone against his own. Nonetheless, Turnbow gave way, seemingly about to let him pass. Only at the last moment did he reach out and grab Jonah's arm—squeezing the hand that he had just been offered until the bones rolled. In one quick motion he pulled off the lamb-skin glove Jonah was wearing, then clamped his own enormous hand over his. Jonah looking down at where he held him, Turnbow's bare hand as cold and as hard as an iron vise. The color of his skin all but indistinguishable from Jonah's own.

“You're no different from me,” he said, though his voice was softer now—almost wondering for a moment. All Jonah could do was blink at him.

“Whatta you
think
is gonna happen?” he asked. “Huh? Whatta you think is gonna happen when
they
find out?”

“Leave me alone, I don't know you!” Jonah had shouted, into the ringing stillness, and Merton Turnbow had let him go without another word. Leaving him to hurry blindly on down the path toward the festivities.

He had gone on down to the dance, and it had been as sweet a night as he had expected, even if he did feel as if the bottom of his stomach had been kicked out, any moment he found himself alone. Half-expecting Merton to appear at any moment and expose him. Waiting to hear that he had been discovered, to see the first dubious glances directed his way.

But there had been nothing. No strange looks, none of the faint murmurings of rumor reaching back to him. Instead, once the snows melted, there had been picnics up in the hills with Isabelle and his friends. It was a warm, early spring and Howard, of course, had found a perfect upper pasture, abandoned with so many of the local farms. There they had hiked on Saturday afternoons and lain out in the early grass, reveling in the new sun. There had been much laughing and drinking, and Howard twirling a loose straw ostentatiously between his teeth, like some local, hayseed farmboy.

One afternoon, shortly before the Easter break, they had gone up to their pasture, as they referred to it now, and had a meal of cheese, and spring apples, and ham sandwiches, washed down with bottles of good Rhine wine that Howie had purloined from his family's cellar. The day was very warm, it was a late Easter that year, and afterward most of them had drifted off to sleep in the grass. Only Jonah and Howard had stayed awake—and Jonah so dizzy with the fine wine that he had to lie down, his hands folded contentedly under his head.

“Come on now, level with me, Jonah,” Howard had said suddenly, and he had found himself instantly on his guard again. Propping himself up on his elbows, his breath slowing. Thinking wildly that this was it—that he
knew
—and wanting to absorb the very last moment of his new life. He had stared silently at the white boy beside him, and waited for the axe to fall, thinking how normal everything still seemed. Howie sitting there with his same, easy self-confidence, arms hooked around his knees. Actual straw and loose grass now threading his limp yellow hair, the tweedy herringbone jacket with the elbow patches he was wearing.

“The truth now, Jonah. Remember, you're with friends, even if it may be difficult for you to admit this.”

“Yes, Howard?” he asked at last, determined to keep his voice from quavering. Readying himself for the words.

“You've never been to Europe.
Have
you?”

“No,” Jonah answered, the word seeming to come out of someone else's detached mouth. His own already full of the excuses and apologies he was set to make. The hillside around them seeming to revolve in his shock and relief, even if he kept talking like a more or less normal person—

“No, I never have.”

“I knew it!” Howard said, turning to grin gleefully at him. “I
knew
you hadn't! That's why you have to!
You
, especially!”

“Have to go to Europe?”

“You can come with me, and the pater and mater. They're a bore, of course, but once we're over there we can strike off on our own. They'd feel very reassured to know I had somebody along— particularly once they get a load of you, the minister's son!”

“Well, I don't know—”

“C'mon, it'll be the nuts! We always take two weeks in London, then go to the continent. We can see Paris with them, then go off on our own. Germany, Switzerland, down to Italy... Damn, think of the girls we'll meet there!”

Howie whispering excitedly now, so as not to wake the others. And seeing that, Jonah had to ask the question that had already started to form, even so soon after his near deadly shock. Unable to resist it—

“But why me? Especially?”

“What?” Howard laughed out loud. “Why
not
you?”

“No, you said ‘You'—that is,
I
—especially, should go to Europe,” Jonah recounted clumsily. “What did you mean? Why me, especially?”

“Oh! That's easy. Because out of all of us, you're the serious one,” Howard said, sweeping a hand back to indicate the others, sleeping in the field.

“The serious one?”

“The serious intellect, the best mind,” Howard told him. He was still smiling, but Jonah could see that his face was perfectly sincere.

“You're the real thinker, old man—the one who really has the chance to go places, do great things. Surely you see that? The rest of us are all pretty frivolous—compared to you.”

“Aw, scram!” Jonah told him, grinning sheepishly, throwing some torn-up grass at his friend—but so proud that he wanted to get up and shout. He wanted to wake up all the rest of them, Isabelle first, and tell them what Howard had said.
Wanted to run back to the dormitory and call up his parents on the hall phone to tell them—if there had only been some way to convey it, some way to get around the fact that this great honor came from his all-white friends, who thought he was one of them.

Instead, he had followed up the tossed grass by giving Howard a shove, and Howard had pushed him back. The two of them laughing and tussling for a little while in the pasture, before their yelps woke up the rest of the party, and they all smiled and shouted in turn to see the two of them going at it.