Strivers Row (52 page)

The shelves, the closets, the drawers, all conspicuously empty now—with none of his own things reordered yet to take over some of the space. Entirely empty of that
style
that Jonah had so envied, that ease and self-confidence that had permeated even his possessions. Howie—that stupid prep school boy's name; how could he have ever loved anyone named
Howie
—had simply disappeared. Out of his room, his life, his closets. Leaving behind, above all, no note, no words of any kind—his silent removal of himself more eloquent a rebuke than anything else he could offer.

For the rest of that Easter night, Jonah had simply sat on his roommate's immaculately made bed and stared at the half-emptied room around him. Not bothering to get undressed, barely summoning the energy to take off his overcoat, only staring at the room around him while a dozen thoughts ran back and forth through his head. He never did move his own possessions into the empty spaces he had been left. Instead, the next morning Jonah had packed up his own things, informing the college that he was moving into the house the four other colored students shared down in the town— the one place, it had been subtly understood between town and school authorities alike, where they would be tolerated.

The harder part had been figuring out how he should try to approach the rest of them, Jack Leonard, and Gilly Mackenzie, and Andy Miller. He had thought about going over to knock on their doors directly, take whatever names they wanted to call him, and face them with his presence. He had even thought about confronting, or at least writing, Howard Marsden. But in the end he had not been able to make up his mind to do anything and save for Jack, none of them had spoken to him, or had anything to do with him again, turning their faces away distastefully when he happened to see them in a classroom, or along the walks of the small campus.

He had worried even longer over what to say, or write, to Isabelle Brinckerhoff, the blond minister's daughter he had dated. Sitting down in the evening every night for weeks with pen in hand, yet never able to come up with anything. Somehow, he suspected that it wouldn't be necessary, and he was proved right in this, too, when a letter finally arrived from her Baptist-minister father, threatening to have him killed—
“or worse!”
—if he should ever approach her again.

He took all these affronts with the same, stolid numbness. Moving on down into the house the colored students shared after humbly asking to live with them. Telling them frankly—
“I think I made a mistake.”

They had accepted him immediately, and he had lived there for the rest of his time at the college, welcoming in turn the other few colored students the college accepted over the rest of his years there. He had helped them all with their studies whenever he could, and unlike every other college athlete he ever encountered, they were attentive students—eager to seize the opportunity they had, devoid of any illusion that they could make their living after college on a football field. And in their turn they had never thrown his earlier denial of them in his face, leaving the subject as blessedly mute as his old white friends.

Except for Merton Turnbow. He had given his permission for Jonah to move in when the others were for it, brusquely dismissing the question with a wave of one huge hand—
“He's gotta live somewhere, I suppose.”
But he never forgave him. Saying no more than a few, perfunctory words to Jonah for the remaining year they spent living in the same house together—even refusing his aid when he was on the verge of failing out of the school altogether. It was only then, exasperated, that Jonah had gathered enough courage to ask why he continued to hate him so.

“It's too easy for you,” Merton had told him coldly. “You can just go back, do it again whenever you want.”

“I
said
I made a mistake. What else can I do, besides ask for forgiveness?”

Turnbow had only snorted at him.

“Don't you see?” he had said, waving a hand at Jonah—at his whole light-skinned body. “It's too easy for you. You can go on repenting, an' being sorry your whole life! You can just repent, an' go right back to where you were, an' there's no consequences for you.”

“That's not so—” Jonah had tried to say in his defense, but Merton shook his head.

“Ah, man, I almost feel sorry for you. You got no idea where you even are,” he said, and walked away then. Having nothing more to do with Jonah for the few remaining weeks before he did flunk out, and left the college as quietly and proudly as he had always walked around it.

Some years later, after Jonah had graduated, and had gone through the Angel Factory down in Pennsylvania and come back to his father's church, he had heard that Merton Turnbow was playing for a semipro team in Harlem that called themselves the Spiders—a team made up of former Negro college stars who were considered too good for the best white pro teams to play. Jonah had snuck over one Sunday to see them playing in Mount Morris Park, under the shadow of its high bell tower, the Spiders pounding away at another colored team from Philadelphia. The crowd was meager, probably not enough to pay their expenses. But there was Merton, Jonah saw in a shock of recognition, slashing away through the defensive back-field, legs churning through the other players, homing in unswervingly on the ball carrier, just as he had in college. Jonah made no attempt to talk to him after the game was over, sure that he would be just as unyielding now. He had only watched him wander off with the other players, jersey covered in mud, limping stoically toward the subway. Sometime later Jonah heard that he was working in Harlem as a short-order cook. Then there had been a picture he had seen by chance in the Pittsburgh
Courier
, a few months after Pearl Harbor. Merton in an army uniform—his determined, angry face staring back accusingly at Jonah.

He had remained friends with the other young men he'd met in the colored house over the next three years, corresponding with them at Christmas—some of them even becoming members of his congregation, if they lived in the City. But the only one of his old white friends Jonah had kept in any touch with was Jack Leonard. He alone had trudged down to the little house where he lived now, and had coffee with Jonah. The two of them so unsure of what to say to each other about the real issue between them that they had remained silent on it that afternoon, and for a long time to come. For the rest of their years at the college, he would see Jack sporadically— the two of them even going out sometimes to their old haunts again, as wary as they were of running into certain people on those occasions. He also saw him walking around campus with his other friends, with Howie and the rest of them. But Jack never brought them over—and Jonah was finally relieved that he didn't.

“It's not that he hates you,” Jack Leonard had tried to explain to him, after they had been referring to it elliptically all night. Another night out at a roadhouse—only this had not been under the stars in a convertible, but in the middle of winter, shivering inside the clunker Howard Marsden had helped him buy, passing the last of a flask of bourbon back and forth.

“He just feels betrayed, that's all.”

“
He
feels betrayed.”

“Well, you gotta admit, it wasn't like you were exactly honest with him—”

“If I were white, you think he'd've cleaned out his things without so much as a word? Even if I had told him some other lie? Even if I had
stolen
something from him? You think he would've moved all his things out in the middle of the night, never given me a chance to explain?” Jonah asked him straight out.

“It's not that, exactly,” Jack Leonard said, grimacing, squirming a little in the passenger's seat. “It's more—it's just the shock of it, is all. You think somebody's white, they turn out to be Negro. That's all. It's just a matter of—
expectations
, I guess.”

“Uh-huh,” Jonah said bitterly. “And what're my expectations supposed to be? And how come
you
weren't shocked when I disappointed your expectations?”

“Well, you know, it's different for me, Jonah,” Leonard said, taking a hurried nip from the flask, passing the rotten, bootleg bourbon back over to him. It roiled his stomach and had already given him a headache, even while he was still drunk, but Jonah took another long swig nonetheless.

“Whatta you mean, it's different for you?” he asked Jack. “What's so different about it?”

“Nah—you know, Jonah,” Jack said, smiling wanly at him. “I mean, I'm a Jew. Well, you knew that, didn't you?”

“Jewish. Sure, sure,” Jonah said. His voice sounding to him like it was coming from a long way away. Wondering to himself,
Is everything hidden to me? How foolish can I be?

“I know what it's like, passing. My grandfather was doin' it soon's he got off the boat,” Jack was saying, beginning to slur his words. “I don't know as he ever really converted. Next thing he knew, my old man said, we're all Episcopalians.”

“Howard knew that, though—didn't he?” Jonah asked slowly. “He and all the rest of the guys? Gilly and Andy? He knew you were Jewish right off, didn't he?”

“Well, sure, yeah,” Leonard said. “He made some joke about it—”

“But you never told him about it. Did you?”

“No. No, I guess not,” Leonard said, sitting up again, beginning to realize what he was getting at. “I guess he just assumed it. It never made any difference—”

“And there it is,” Jonah said, cutting him off.

“Yeah, I guess there it is,” Jack sighed.

Jonah had stuck it out through the rest of the semester, and the remaining three years at the college. He had stuck it through even though he had wanted to get on the next train and go back home immediately, the moment he saw that Howard Marsden had cleared out of their dorm room.

He had secretly hoped that he wouldn't. All the way back to school on that train, he had secretly hoped that Howie had decided, somehow, to stay. Still wanting to sit down across from him at his desk, when he was at his most serious—when they would have their best talks about literature and theology and philosophy, and the whole idea of what a man could know, and not know. The whole happy, silly range of undergraduate thought. And he had wanted to sit there, and talk to him seriously about what had happened, and how much he had gotten from it, and what would happen now.

He had dreamed up that whole, lovely scenario, just in the time it took him to get back and look at his cleaned-out room that night. Dreaming, even, of some kind of grand rapprochement, in which they talked all night, and ended up shaking hands, then going down to the college cafeteria, arm in arm, for breakfast. Dreaming of Howie Marsden telling him he could still come along on his family vacation to Europe—

But he was not surprised when it didn't happen. Thinking, too, during his long night sitting on his roommate's bed:
This is our dominant trait: the singular ability to anticipate disappointment.
Bred in the bone from so many years of living so close to white people. Thinking that sitting there on his roommate's bed like a dog, like a goddamned, pining dog—

He didn't go. He stuck it out until graduation without even a hint to his parents—then—about all that had transpired. Sticking it out in good part because he couldn't conceive of a plausible explanation as to why he should drop out and come home.

He didn't go to Europe in the summer, of course. Instead he went back to his Daddy's church in Harlem, and worked in the soup kitchen, and learned more ins and outs of the preaching business. All the little professional secrets his father had to tell him— for it was a business, like any other, Jonah realized, though for the moment he had lost all his previous desire for it. All of it seeming more and more hollow the more he knew it, despite what he had thought had been his conversion, so many years before.

That was his first crisis of faith—what he had thought was so firm, crumbling away beneath him. Nor was there anything he could cling to up at school anymore, no ambition he retained, nothing he got out of the various lectures or professors. Only going back every semester for his parents, to do the penance he had inflicted upon himself.

The only person he had told, finally, had been his father. Not even Amanda, after all these years—just
him
.
Unable to keep anything from him since his first days of school, when he would go talk to him in his vestry office.
Confessing it to him in the same way, during the Easter recess of his senior year, weeks before he graduated. More afraid than of anything else in his life of what he might say, but feeling too broken by then to keep it in.

“I made a mistake—” he told his father, standing before him where he sat at that big rolltop desk. The old man listening gravely to him the whole time, looking over the top of his reading spectacles, not interrupting him once until he was finished.

“Never let that happen again,” was the only thing his father said when Jonah was finished—then turned back to the Easter sermon on his desk.

He had been stunned that that was all the old man had to say to him. Leaving Jonah with nothing for it but to back slowly out of his vestry. It was the one time he could ever remember his father letting him down.
Hoping for something more, even in the form of a rebuke, a scolding.
Something to make him feel it. Speculating endlessly to himself, in the days and years that followed, whether his father had simply been too rattled over how close he had come to losing him, or whether, with almost supernatural foresight, he had deliberately left it to Jonah to figure out.
Left it to him to find the bottom himself, and thereby to raise himself up again.

But either way, it hadn't mattered at the time. A few days after their circumscribed conversation, Jonah had journeyed back upstate to the college for the last time, to take his final exams. He had worked hard, finishing seventh in his class, despite feeling the entire time as if he had been kicked in the stomach. The graduation was held on an unusually warm, muggy spring day, and that morning Jack Leonard had come down to the colored house in town, to shake his hand, and wish him well.