A Walker in the City (18 page)

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Yeshua my Yeshua! What had he to do with those who killed his own and worshiped him as God? Why would
they
call him only by that smooth Greek name of Jesus? He was Yeshua, my own Reb Yeshua, of whose terrible death I could never read without bursting into tears—Yeshua, our own Yeshua, the most natural of us all, the most direct, the most enchanted, and as he sprang up from the heart of poor Jews, all the dearer to me because he could now return to his own kind:
and the poor have the gospel preached to them.

 

Ripeness filled our kitchen even at supper time. The room was so wild with light, it made me tremble; I could not believe my eyes. In the sink a great sandy pile of radishes, lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, and scallions broke up on their stark greens and reds the harshness of the world's daily monotony. The window shade by the sewing machine was drawn, its tab baking in the sun. Through the screen came the chant of the score being called up from the last handball game below. Our front door was open, to let in air; you could hear the boys on the roof scuffing their shoes against the gravel. Then, my father home to the smell of paint in the hall, we sat down to chopped cucumbers floating in the ice-cold borscht, radishes and tomatoes and lettuce in sour cream, a mound of corn just out of the pot steaming on the table, the butter slowly melting in a cracked blue soup plate—breathing hard against the heat, we sat down together at last.

Daylight at evening. The whitewashed walls have turned yellow in great golden combs, as if the butter dribbling down our chins from each new piece of corn we lovingly prepare with butter and salt were oozing down the walls. The kitchen is quiet under the fatigue blown in from the parched streets—so quiet that in this strangely drawn-out light, the sun hot on our backs, we seem to be eating hand in hand. "How hot it is still! How hot still!" The silence and calm press on me with a painful joy. I cannot wait to get out into the streets tonight, I cannot wait. Each unnatural moment of silence says that something is going on outside. Something is about to happen. The sound of an impending explosion waits in the summer night.

In the open, now. The sun hanging below the end of each block hits me in the face. They have opened the fire hydrants and have put up a revolving shower in the middle of the street, and kids stripped to their underwear run squealing in and out of the feebly sputtering drops. "
Mama! Look at me, Mama!
" Where the gutter is wet now, it glistens like rhinestones; where dry, it is blue. Halfway down the block a horse lies dead in the gutter, a cloud of flies buzzing at his eyes. A little carousel has drawn up next to the grocery. The hurdy-gurdy skips whole notes at a time, as if it were being pressed and squeezed out of shape each time the wooden horses with long straw manes come round again. The pony glumly relieves himself in his traces, and the sparrows float down from the telephone wires to peck and peck at each fresh steaming mound of manure, and the smell of the milk scum from the great open cans outside the grocery is suddenly joined, on a passing breath of wind, to the smell of varnish and brine from the barrels outside the warehouse on Bristol Street. Westward, on the streets that lead to the park, the dusty trees of heaven droop in the sun. You can smell Brownsville's tiredness in the air like smoke. Slowly, how slowly now, the pigeons rise and fall in their unchanging orbits as they go round and round the roofs, the enigmatic spire of the church, and brush against the aged sycamore with sharp leaves.

And now there is time. This light will not go out until I have lodged it in every crack and corner of me first.

 

There was a new public library I liked to walk out to right after supper, when the streets were still full of light. It was to the north of the Italians, just off the El on Broadway, in the "American" district of old frame houses and brownstones and German ice-cream parlors and quiet tree-lined streets where I went to high school. Everything about that library was good, for it was usually empty and cool behind its awnings, and the shelves were packed with books that not many people ever seemed to take away. But even better was the long walk out of Brownsville to reach it.

How wonderful it was in the still suspended evening light to go past the police station on East New York and come out into the clinging damp sweetness of Italian cheese. The way to the borders of Brownsville there was always heavy with blocks of indistinguishable furniture stores, monument works, wholesale hardware shops. Block after block was lined with bedroom sets, granite tombstones, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, store fixtures, cash registers. It was like taking one last good look around before you said good-by. As the sun bore down on new kitchen ranges and refrigerators, I seemed to hear the clang of all those heavily smooth surfaces against the fiery windows, to feel myself pulled down endless corridors of tombstones, cash registers, maple beds, maple love seats, maple vanity tables. But at the police station, the green lamps on each side of the door, the detectives lounging along the street, the smell from the dark, damp, leaky steps that led down to the public toilets below, instantly proclaimed the end of Brownsville.

Ahead, the Italians' streets suddenly reared up into hills, all the trolley car lines flew apart into wild plunging crossroads—the way to anywhere, it seemed to me then. And in the steady heat, the different parts of me racing each other in excitement, the sweat already sweet on my face, still tasting on my lips the corn and salt and butter, I would dash over the tree-lined island at the crossroads, and on that boulevard so sharp with sun that I could never understand why the new red-brick walk of the Catholic church felt so cool as I passed, I crossed over into the Italian district.

I still had a certain suspicion of the Italians—surely they were all Fascists to a man? Every grocery window seemed to have a picture of Mussolini frowning under a feather-tipped helmet, every drugstore beneath the old-fashioned gold letters pasted on the window a colored lithograph of the Madonna with a luminescent heart showing through a blue gown. What I liked best in the windows were the thickly printed opera posters, topped by tiny photographs of singers with olive-bronze faces. Their long straight noses jutted aloofly, defying me to understand them. But despite the buzz of unfamiliar words ending in the letter
i,
I could at least make contact with L
A
F
ORZA DEL
D
ESTINO
. In the air was that high overriding damp sweetness of Italian cheese, then something peppery. In a butcher shop window at the corner of Pacific Street long incredibly thin sausage rings were strung around a horizontal bar. The clumps of red and brown meat dripping off those sausage rings always stayed with me until I left the Italians at Fulton Street—did they eat such things?

Usually, at that hour of the early evening when I passed through on my way to the new library, they were all still at supper. The streets were strangely empty except for an old man in a white cap who sat on the curb sucking at a twisted Italian cigar. I felt I was passing through a deserted town and knocking my head against each door to call the inhabitants out. It was a poor neighborhood, poor as ours. Yet all the houses and stores there, the very lettering of the signs A
VVOCATO
F
ARMACIA
L
ATTERIA
tantalized me by their foreignness. Everything there looked smaller and sleepier than it did in Brownsville. There was a kind of mild, infinitely soothing smell of flour and cheese mildly rotting in the evening sun. You could almost taste the cheese in the sweat you licked off your lips, could feel your whole body licking and tasting at the damp inner quietness that came out of the stores. The heat seemed to melt down every hard corner in sight.

Beyond Atlantic Avenue the sun glared and glared on broken glass lining the high stone walls of a Catholic reformatory that went all around the block. Barbed wire rose up on the other side of the wall, and oddly serene above the broken glass, very tall trees. Behind those walls, I had always heard, lived "bad girls" under the supervision of nuns. We knew what all that broken glass meant. The girls stole out every night and were lifted over the walls every morning by their laughing boy friends. We knew. The place was a prison house of the dark and hypocritical Catholic religion. Whenever I heard the great bell in the yard clanging for prayers as I passed, I had the same image in my mind of endless barren courts of narrow rooms, in each of which a girl in a prison smock looked up with pale hatred at a nun.

 

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys and desires

 

Jesus!
I would say to myself with hoped-for scorn,
Look at my Yeshua!
How I wanted to get on to my library, to get on beyond that high stone wall lined with the jagged ends of broken milk bottles; never to have to look back at that red-bricked church that reared itself up across from the borders of Brownsville like a fortress. Once, on the evening before an examination, I had gone into that church, had tried vaguely to pray, but had been so intimidated by the perpetual twilight, the remoteness of the freezing white altar and the Italian women in kerchiefs around me, that at a low murmuring out of a confession box near the door I had run away. Yet how lonely it always was passing under the wall—as if I were just about to be flung against it by a wave of my own thought.

 

Ahead of me now the black web of the Fulton Street El. On the other side of the B
ANCA
C
OMMERCIALE
, two long even pavements still raw with sunlight at seven o'clock of a summer evening take me straight through the German and Irish "American" neighborhoods. I could never decide whether it was all those brownstones and blue and gray frame houses or the sight of the library serenely waiting for me that made up the greatest pleasure of that early evening walk. As soon as I got out from under the darkness of the El on Fulton Street, I was catapulted into tranquillity.

Everything ahead of me now was of a different order—wide, clean, still, every block lined with trees. I sniffed hungrily at the patches of garden earth behind the black iron spikes and at the wooden shutters hot in the sun—there where even the names of the streets, Macdougal, Hull, Somers, made me humble with admiration. The long quiet avenues rustled comfortably in the sun; above the brownstone stoops all the yellow striped awnings were unfurled. Every image I had of peace, of quiet shaded streets in some old small-town America I had seen dreaming over the ads in the
Saturday Evening Post
, now came back to me as that proud procession of awnings along the brownstones. I can never remember
walking
those last few blocks to the library; I seemed to float along the canvas tops. Here were the truly American streets; here was where they lived. To get that near to brownstones, to see how private everything looked in that world of cool black painted floors and green walls where on each windowsill the first shoots of Dutch bulbs rose out of the pebbles like green and white flags, seemed to me the greatest privilege I had ever had. A breath of long-stored memory blew out at me from the veranda of Oyster Bay. Even when I visited an Irish girl from my high school class who lived in one of those brownstones, and was amazed to see that the rooms were as small as ours, that a Tammany court attendant's family could be as poor as we were, that behind the solid "American" front of fringed shawls, Yankee rocking chairs, and oval daguerreotypes on the walls they kept warm in winter over an oil stove—even then, I could think of those brownstone streets only as my great entrance into America, a half-hour nearer to "New York."

I had made a discovery; I had stumbled on a connection between myself and the shape and color of time in the streets of New York. Though I knew that brownstones were old-fashioned and had read scornful references to them in novels, it was just the thick, solid way in which they gripped to themselves some texture of the city's past that now fascinated me. There was one brownstone on Macdougal Street I would stop and brood over for long periods every evening I went to the library for fresh books—waiting in front of it, studying every crease in the stone, every line in the square windows jutting out above the street, as if I were planning its portrait. I had made a discovery: walking could take me back into the America of the nineteenth century.

On those early summer evenings, the library was usually empty, and there was such ease at the long tables under the plants lining the windowsills, the same books of American history lay so undisturbed on the shelves, the wizened, faintly smiling little old lady who accepted my presence without questions or suggestions or reproach was so delightful as she quietly, smilingly stamped my card and took back a batch of new books every evening, that whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves. For each new book I took away, there seemed to be ten more of which I was depriving myself. Everything that summer I was sixteen was of equal urgency—Renan's
Life of Jesus;
the plays of Eugene O'Neill, which vaguely depressed me, but were full of sex; Galsworthy's
The Forsyte Saga,
to which I was so devoted that even on the day two years later Hitler came to power I could not entirely take it in, because on the same day John Galsworthy died; anything about Keats and Blake; about Beethoven; the plays of W. Somerset Maugham, which I could not relate to the author of
Of Human Bondage; The Education of Henry Adams,
for its portrait of John Quincy Adams leading his grandson to school; Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians,
for its portrait of Cardinal Newman, the beautiful Newman who played the violin and was seen weeping in the long sad evening of his life; Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice,
which seemed to me vaguely sinister and unbearably profound; Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons,
which I took away one evening to finish on my fire escape with such a depth of satisfaction that I could never open the book again, for fear I would not recapture that first sensation.