Strivers Row (50 page)

“I cook all his meals for him, and he's never had indigestion!”

“Why don't you use the real stove?” Malcolm asked.

“Oh, we had the gas and electricity turned off years ago,” Langley told him as he pushed the meat around in its pan. “Homer can't see, so he doesn't need light. And as for me, well, I prefer it a trifle shady.”

He took the finished meat, now cooked down to a small, burnt strip, and put it on a plate along with a knife and fork, and a large spoon. Then he took it over to his brother—carefully tucking a threadbare, monogrammed napkin into Homer's nightshirt first, and turning on an ancient crystal radio, by the side of the cot, that Malcolm saw was hooked into a storage battery. A long, beautiful burst of classical music flowed out, then trailed off to an end— followed by a piping, irritated voice.

“This is your mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia! You are listening to the people's radio, WNYC—”

Langley shut off the radio at once.

“Who
is
that irritating man?” he groused. “He's ruining the most wonderful classical music station!”

He commenced to feed his brother the tiny cubes of the meat with the spoon as he spoke. Homer dropped open his mushy orange mouth like a baby bird—his eyes closed, trusting Langley to place the less-than-bite-size pieces right on his tongue, from where he seemed to swallow them whole.

“I used to read to Homer at night,” he told Malcolm as he chopped the blackened strip of meat into smaller and smaller pieces. “We have all the classics in our library, of course. I would read to him from Shakespeare, or Dickens. But then my eyes went bad, too, and I stopped. Now we just talk and listen to the radio. The music is wonderful, save for that annoying Italian fellow who keeps claiming to be the mayor.”

“Why you have all these newspapers, then?” Malcolm asked.

“Oh, for when Homer regains his sight, of course! Then he can catch up on everything that's been going on.”

He finished spooning the bits of charred meat into his brother, then dabbed at his face carefully with the napkin before removing it. Homer actually looked contented, his mouth closed in a small, childlike smile.

“You know, when Homer first lost his sight, he used to have visions of beautiful buildings—always in red. He would describe them to me, and I would try to paint them just as he directed. Here, let me show you—”

Langley led Malcolm over to the recesses of the kitchen, where he held up his lamp again to reveal row after row of stacked canvasses— each and every one of them filled with fantastic buildings, and all slashed with blood-red paint. There was painting after painting of mansions and brownstones, skyscrapers and single houses—all of them smeared in thick, coagulated gobs of red.

“Did he dream all these?”

“Not really
dream
,” Langley said in a whisper, sidling up close to him, glancing back at where his brother sat, stock-still again.

“He never really
sleeps
. I have to bathe him and tend to all his wants. He sits there all the time with his eyes closed, but he never really sleeps! I have lost fifty pounds in that time because I never sleep, either, but I'm not complaining! I have a way of relaxing without sleeping so I can write down whatever he says in the middle of the night. It's most worthwhile. Not only the pictures, I mean, he has invented the most marvelous telescope in his head—”

Malcolm reached for one of the blood-red canvasses, and noticed a large wooden baby crib behind it. He squinted down into it—and found himself peering at a tiny, two-headed baby, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Next to it were a pair of yellowed human skulls, along with the bones of a spine, a rib cage, hands and feet. Malcolm dropped the painting and jumped back, the grub-white face of Langley looming up right next to his.

“I gotta go,” he said hurriedly, wondering now if he might have to kill the old man to get out.
And how would he ever find his way?

“Hmm? Oh, those are old medical specimens that belonged to my father,” Langley said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Did I tell you he was the finest gynecologist in New York? But let me see you out.”

They moved out of the kitchen and back into the labyrinth of tunnels—Malcolm glancing back at Homer, who looked now like nothing so much as an effigy from a waxworks show down on 42nd Street. One of the world's great murderers or scoundrels—sitting there doubled up on his cot, unnaturally still and white, with his eyes closed.

“Don't worry. He'll be all right until I get back,” Langley assured him.

But what worried Malcolm more were the traces of a woman he kept noticing everywhere as they started back down the tunnels. There were bottles of violet perfume scattered around on different pianos, and tabletops. They passed a glass-fronted dresser, full of strange, perfectly preserved dresses, embroidered with silk and glittering jewels. There was even a long skein of knitting, encased in dust, with two wooden knitting needles still embedded in the loops of wool.

“Whose that?” Malcolm asked at last, holding it up by one end, trying to see what the color was.

“That was our mother's,” Langley said, taking the knitting carefully out of Malcolm's hands. “She was a world-famous opera singer, before she married my father. And a great beauty, in her day.”

“Oh, yeah? Where she at?”

“Cypress Hills Cemetery. She passed on fourteen years ago,” Langley said, folding the knitting over twice, oblivious to the small explosions of dust that erupted from it.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Malcolm looked away, and in the narrow swath of light from the miner's lamp, he could see that they had reached the end of the tunnel. Another ponderous door stood before them, piles of unopened envelopes choking its letter drop, and spilling down into the foyer. Malcolm noticed that many of them were stamped with the return addresses of banks, and utility companies. Langley evinced no interest in them, sweeping the dead letters away with his feet, unbolting the huge door and straining at its rusty frame.

“I will let you out here, if I can. That will surprise anyone who's watching,” he said, pulling the door away with startling ease.

“You really think somebody's watching you?” Malcolm asked him.

“Our life here has been forty years of being harassed by hoodlums! Those people out there have broken over two hundred of our windows,” he began to rant again. “I never carry more than seventy-five cents in my pocket at any time, out of fear of being mugged!”

The door finally cracked open, swinging slowly, diffidently through the mounds of mail like a battleship moving through a choppy sea. They had emerged on the 128th Street side of the building, Malcolm saw. Directly above them was a dimmed streetlamp, but it shone on them like a spotlight after the greater darkness inside the house— Langley's perfectly white face looking yellow now, as if reflected on a movie screen.

“Why'd you bring me in here?” Malcolm said abruptly, interrupting Langley's long spiel about how they had been besieged by
those people
.

“You know what I am. What made you bring me in here?” he repeated, staying where he was in the doorway.

“There was a girl, once,” Langley said after a long pause, staring out into the street. “She came here for music lessons. I was training her on the piano, she had great potential! Then, one day, she stopped coming. I don't know if it was something I said—something I did.

“I wrote to her. I even went to her home, I offered to continue her lessons for free. But her mother only said that she had gone away. That was all! Nothing else—no address where I might reach her, no further excuse.

“She shut the door in my face, but I went back to her street every evening for months, trying to spy a glimpse of her. I would even sit on the stoop across from her house all night and into the morning, to see if she was there—just to
know
she was still there!”

He was looking at Malcolm now, his dusty pale white face very close to his. The skin oddly unwrinkled and fresh, like a much younger man's, he could see now.

“But she never came back, wherever she was. I never saw her again. I saw you—well, you know how beautiful you are. I didn't want to fail, to act again—”

Malcolm didn't wait to hear the rest of what he had to say, reaching out and pushing him away. The ghosty man falling back into the house, against the stacks of his newspapers, like an empty sack, while Malcolm ran up to the sidewalk, and down 128th Street toward Lenox Avenue.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

JONAH

It started to rain before dawn that Sunday, hard little pellets that raked their bedroom window, so that Jonah knew he would have to be up early. By the time he eased the big, green Lincoln out of its back-alley garage, the rain had begun to taper off, but between the weather and the gas rationing, he was sure the buses would be out again. After he dropped Amanda off at the church, he trolled up and down Lenox, and Eighth Avenue, in the big car, looking for any members of his congregation who might still be waiting at a bus stop.

All along the way he saw the ministers from every other church in Harlem, doing the same. Exchanging friendly waves and honks with them—at least all those who still had a car, and the ration points to fuel it. Picking up entire families still huddled under the bus shelters. More women than men, as was always the case, but especially so now with the war on. The older church mothers in their proud hats, undaunted by the rain. The children with their hair and clothes immaculately combed and pressed. The boys in blazers that were too big or too small, showing inches of white cuff, and the plastic tabs on their neckties; little girls in dresses that spread out above their knees like umbrellas, and shiny black patent shoes—

Jonah would fill the Lincoln with as many as he could, then move on to the next family, rolling down the window to tell them the buses were out. The mother or father would lean in, nodding— the news nothing they hadn't expected to hear. They would thank him solemnly, and begin to walk slowly up toward the church, moving as fast as the youngest or the oldest among them could manage.

By late morning it had settled into a blustery, turbulent day; the dark gray clouds skittering across the sky, and the fleeting water rainbows forming and dissolving on the sidewalk. A day of illusions, and second glances. Passing “Beale Street,” at 133rd and Seventh, Jonah glimpsed the working girls there still staggering along the curb—soaked to the skin, disappearing into doorways. Men in uniform climbing up from the after-hours bars below the street, ducking back down behind the stoops when they spotted the arm-bands of approaching MPs.
Harlem never did shut down anymore. Not even on Sunday—

At 132nd Street, idling at a light, he noticed a crowd drawn to a pair of women evangelists. He had seen them on the corner before. The one tall and slender as a reed, reading out Bible passages in a commanding voice, the other short and pudgy. The short one held the umbrella, stretching to raise it up over her partner, and the Bible—while at the same time she interpreted each verse in a shrill, raucous shout, and according to her own vehement theology.

“I'm ain't talkin' 'bout no Pharaoh an' the Israelites, I'm talkin' 'bout the he-in' and she-in' a you Harlemites, right here an' right now!” she ranted, while the crowd around her laughed and clapped.

“I'm talkin' 'bout how mothers and fathers teach their chillen one thing in the South but they do another thing in the North, and they will
surely
pay the penalty. God will
not
be mocked!”

The people gathered there laughed some more. The Harlem of the simmering anger, of all the strange curbside congregations he had noticed, gone for the moment, between Sunday, and the rain. Just in front of him, at the perimeter of the crowd, Jonah watched a young man, still wearing the sports shirt and slacks he had no doubt put on the night before, smiling sheepishly. Telling the woman with him,
“Man, that old lady is sure steppin' on my toes! Gosh, that one hit my pet corn awful hard!”

After a little while he had become almost mesmerized by the drizzle and the steady beat of his windshield wipers, the ever changing street scene before him. Making wider and wider loops around the neighborhood, swinging down past the Harlem Defense Center, where he watched the happy, smiling young men on leave, walking out with pretty, slim brown women on their arms. Driving past a group of sailor messmen, who stood and squatted on their haunches outside Jock's Place—pulling on cigarette butts, their faces blank and desolate, while they listened to the jukebox blasting “Don't Stop Now” through the open door. Still more families, still plodding their way toward church—his, or someone else's. Walking with immense, careful dignity, trying to avoid stepping into puddles or being splattered by the passing cars, waiting every few yards for the children to catch up.

And watching them, Jonah was filled with a surpassing love. For the churchgoing families—but also for the high-stepping soldiers and the blue sailors, and the Mutt-and-Jeff evangelists, and the insecure young man. Even for the working girls, soaked to the skin out on the pavement. He was almost dizzy with it, in that moment. Feeling his love encompass all of it, here where he lived in Harlem, this little enclave of so much sin, and despair, and hopelessness, but also of such immeasurable beauty. At 125th Street, he noticed the Checker cabs already taking the more optimistic fans up for the doubleheader scheduled that afternoon at the Polo Grounds— each of them with enough empty seats to carry an entire family to church. The white faces in the back windows staring out alertly, awash in apprehension and distaste. Jonah was in turn filled with nothing but pity for them, to be passing through this wondrous place but to know it so little. Thinking of a verse from Lamentations—
“Is it nothing to you, all ye who pass by?”

“Good morning, Rev'rend Minister!”

The booming voice was familiar but impossible here. He swung his head around to see Adam Clayton Powell, large as life—larger!— and grinning playfully at him. Pipe clenched firmly in teeth, seated behind the wheel of his jaunty Cadillac.

“And a beautiful morning it is!” Adam sang out.

Beside him, in the passenger seat, sat the cryptic, one-armed Wingee. Four of the most elderly church mothers from the Abyssinian were seated comfortably in the back of the Caddy, which was about as wide as Adam's boat up at Oak Bluffs. Jonah rolled his own passenger window hurriedly down, thinking that he should warn Adam about his encounter up at The Mansion, but not sure how or if he should do it here and now, stuck at a public street corner.

“I thought you were still on the Vineyard—” he began, stupidly.

“Oh, I just thought I'd drop in for a little
Harlem
! I got lonesome for it, up on that fancy island!” he shouted gaily, smiling at the old women in his backseat, who smiled back at him as if he were their own son, home from Harvard.

“Listen, I, uh, had a talk with the O'Kanes yesterday,” Jonah said haltingly. “They want you to lay low on those Metropolitan Life houses—”

“ 'Course they do!” Adam thundered, laughing even as he did. Pulling the pipe out of his teeth at last and stabbing at Jonah with it. “They'll do anything not to have to live next to black people, Brother Minister!
Anything!
What you tell 'em?”

“I told them—” Jonah said slowly, trying not to sound too proud, “I told them that they would have to find themselves another bag man.”

“Good for you, Rev'rend! Don't worry, we'll hold their feet to the fire. The Communists, the Democrats, the Republicans—we'll play 'em all against each other, till in the end they'll be
asking
to integrate!” Adam barked, banging a fist off the dashboard for emphasis. Grinning and turning to his backseat choir again:

“Ain't that right, ladies?”

“That's right!” they cried out as the light changed and Adam sped off in his Caddy. Waving gaily back at Jonah.

“Good-bye, Rev'rend! See you in church!”

Jonah drove on more slowly, shaking his head and smiling despite himself, feeling the pride coursing through him at Adam's compliment, even though he knew it was foolish. He tried to keep his head level, with this unfamiliar surge of confidence, and even happiness—trying to concentrate on the task at hand. At the corner of 126th and Eighth he spotted an unlikely trio, just emerging from The Clean Spot, the little diner on the street level of the Braddock Hotel. There were two women, modestly dressed for the Braddock; one of them young, the other grey haired. Both of them walking arm in arm, with a tall, broad-shouldered young man in army dress khakis, a broad, black-and-white “MP” band around his upper-right arm. All three looked a little lost, and although they were not his parishioners and he could not remember having seen them before, Jonah pulled up to the curb in his ebullience.

“Excuse me, Rev'rend, but we was just looking to find a church,” the MP said, grinning at Jonah so ingenuously that he could not help smiling back.

“You're welcome to come to mine, son. If you'd like to get on in, I'll take you all right up there.”

“Why, that's full service now!” the MP beamed at him again, opening the back door for the two women. “Thank you, sir! Thank you very much, it would be an honor!”

Jonah thought he looked little older than a teenager—just a big, overgrown boy in his army khakis—and he wondered at his being an MP. The young man bundled the two women gently but enthusiastically into the Lincoln's backseat before him. The one lady looking even younger than he was—the other clearly a relative, wearing an older, womanly version of the boy's credulous, young face.

“This is my Mama, Mrs. Florine Roberts. And my fiancée, Miss Susan Torbohn,” he said proudly, extending a hand up to shake Jonah's in the front seat. “My name's Robert Bandy. With the 730th MPs, over in Jersey City—”

“Good to know you, Robert,” Jonah said, shaking the young man's hand while he watched him in the rearview mirror. Trying hard not to smile too much at his overflowing enthusiasm.

“You know, you ought to be careful around the Braddock,” he told them as sternly as he could manage. “It used to be a classy place, for show people. But since the Depression... Well, I'm sure it's on your off-limits list, Robert—”

“I know, I know,” the MP said, as earnestly as ever. The easy smile dropping from his face at once, looking like a chastised puppy.

“Mama was just stayin' there 'cause it's the only place she could find, comin' down from Middletown to see me,” he said, a note of pride rising again in his voice. “It's hard to find
any
where now, with the war—”

“I been worse. I can take care myself,” the older woman interrupted. Her accent from somewhere in the Deep South, Jonah thought, probably Mississippi—speaking with her son's same pridefulness, and a dose of motherly self-pity. “It's best I can do, workin's a maid up there in Middletown.”

Jonah could really see the resemblance now—the MP's proud, hopeful face wrung through a lifetime of cleaning other people's toilets, and kitchen floors. She was a large, dark, bulky woman who looked as if she could indeed handle herself, wearing a respectable if aging burgundy dress, a white hat with plastic yellow flowers. Despite the heat she even had a secondhand, imitation fur of some kind, fake fox or fake mink; rubbed down to a motley bit of fluff around her neck but still worn with indomitable self-esteem. Next to her, the future daughter-in-law looked all but overwhelmed. Pretty and slender, modestly dressed; sitting as demurely as possible in the middle seat, over the hump, with her thin shoulders hunched up and her eyes lowered.

“It's not so bad,” the old woman insisted. “I seen cleaner places. But the wors' thing is the police comin' in all night. Throwin' colored an' white people out just for bein' together, they say. Excuse me, Rev'rend!”

“That's all right.”

“But I seen worse. Just hard gettin' any sleep there, is all! But I wanted to come down, see my boy 'fore they ship him out.”

“Oh, Mama, I don't know if they even will ship us out,” he told her in a consoling voice. “Besides, it's not so bad for MPs—”

“Huh!” Mrs. Roberts snorted. “Tha's what
you
say! You should see where they keepin' 'em out in Jersey City, Rev'rend, all the colored boys. Got 'em stacked up on ships, half the time, while the white boys get the barracks.
Ship
holds, all full a rats an' like that. Now I ask you, Rev'rend, is that
fair
?”

“Mama! That's classified information!”

Robert Bandy put a hand on her knee, obviously embarrassed. But his mother only leaned forward, appealing directly to Jonah, who kept his eyes firmly on the road.

“I'm askin' you—ain't there
somethin'
you can do?”

“Mama, he ain't even our minister!”

“Well, seems like there must be
somethin'
a minister in this big City could do,” she concluded, letting her son pull her back into the cavernous seat of the Lincoln, but with more than a hint of reproach in her voice.

“I apologize for my Mama, Rev'rend,” Bandy said quickly. “She just worries about me too much. I don't want to trouble you with anything. I'll be fine. We all be fine.”

By the time he got back to the New Jerusalem, Jonah only had time to splash some water on his face, and throw on his white ministerial robe in the vestry. The service starting late as it was, something that had become necessary since the war, and the periodic and unannounced disappearance of the buses.
No time even to visit his father, as he always liked to do on Sundays before services.
The old man rarely came out for them anymore—which Jonah worried in his heart might be a reflection on him, too. Attendance had been falling off again, more empty spots appearing in the pews than there had ever been in Milton's day. Jonah tried to tell himself it was due to the war, and the breakdown of the buses, but he knew better.

He breezed through all the usual preliminaries—what his father liked to call the rigamarole. Moving by rote through the opening greeting and prayer, the benevolent offering, and the church announcements. Two hymns and a spiritual from the choir, along with a solo by Miss Stella Jones, a young woman who was training down at the Institute of Musical Art. More prayers, for the sick and the dying, and the sons of the congregation who were off at war—