Atlantis: Three Tales (13 page)

“—Toomer?” Sam supplied.

“Now don't tell me you're related to him . . . ?” The man laughed. “Though you look somewhat like him. You know, Jean just ran off with the wife of my very good friend, Waldo—so I don't think I'm really
supposed
to like him right through here—it's the kind of thing you don't write your mother about. But I do—like him, that is. He's handsome, brilliant, talented. How could one help it? Maybe that's why I took a chance and spoke to you—because you do look something like him. New York is the biggest of cities, but the smallest of worlds. Everybody always turns out to know everyone else—”

“No,” Sam said. “No. I'm not his relative. But he's a friend of my . . .” How did you explain about your brother's strange girlfriend—who was the one who
knew
everybody. “A friend of my brother's. Well, a friend of a girl my brother knows.” Though Clarice had said he looked like Toomer, she hadn't mentioned the absconsion. “She was the one who told me about him.” He couldn't imagine Clarice approving of such carryings on.

“Oh, well, there—you see. You know, that man you were watching, in the boat—do you mind if I sit down?”

“No. Sure . . . !”

The young man stepped around the bench's end, flopped to the seat, and flung both arms along the back: “Lord, he was hung! Like a stallion! Pissed like a racehorse, too!” He looked over, grinning behind his glasses. “To see it from up here at all, someone's got to throw a stream as thick as a fire hose. It was something, 'ey?”

Sam was surprised—and found himself grinning at the ridiculousness of it. People didn't strip down to stand up and make water before all New York—but if someone did, even less did you talk about it. That both had happened within the hour seemed to overthrow the anxiety of the last minutes, and struck him as exorbitantly comic.

“But did you see what he did?” Sam asked. “Did you see?”

“I saw as much as you, I bet—maybe more, the way you ran off.”
The fellow hit him playfully on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

“I mean, he must have jumped in . . . for a swim. Or maybe—”

“No,” the man said. “I don't think he'd have done that.” He seemed suddenly pensive. “It's much too cold. The water's still on the nippy side, this early in spring.”

“But he
must
have,” Sam said. He'd stopped laughing. “I saw the boat, later on—over there.” He pointed toward Brooklyn. “There was no one in it. I know it was the same boat. Because of the hat, and . . . because of his hat.”

“No one in it?” The man seemed surprised.

“It was floating empty. He must have fallen overboard—or jumped in. Then he couldn't get back up. The boat was just drifting, turning in circles. Really—there was no one in it at all!”

The man narrowed his eyes, then looked pensively out at the sky while a train's open-air trundle filled the space beneath them. Through the green v's of the beams supporting the rail, over the walkway's edge, Sam could see the car tops moving toward the city. Finally the man said: “No, I don't think that's what happened. He was probably one of the Italian fishermen living over there. I live over there, too—not too far from them. A clutch of Genovesi.” He too waved toward Brooklyn. “God, those guineas are magnificent animals! Swim like porpoises—at least the boys do. You can watch them, frisking about in the water just down from where I live. Fell in?
Naw . . . !”
He burlesqued the word, speaking it in an exaggerated tone of someone who didn't use it naturally. “It's a bold swimmer who jumps into the midst of his own pee. You think he went under in his own maelstrom, while your white aeroplane of Help soared overhead? Oh, no. The East River's not really a river, you know. It's a saltwater estuary—complete with tides. So even that whole herd of pissers from the Naval Shipyard, splattering off the concrete's edge every day, doesn't significantly change the taste. Jump? I'll tell you what's more likely. After he spilled his manly quarts, he lay down in the bottom and let his boat float, with the sunlight filling it up around him as if it were a tub and the light was a froth of suds. And when, finally, he drifts into the dago docks, he'll jump up, grab hold of
it, and shake that long-skinned guinea pizzle for the little Genoese lassies out this afternoon to squeal over, go running to their mothers, and snigger at. No, suicidal or otherwise, his kind doesn't go in for drowning.”

Sam started to repeat that the boat had been empty. But—well,
was
there a chance he'd missed the form stretched on the bottom? Sam said, “You live in Brooklyn?” because that was all he could think to say. (No. He remembered the oar. The boat had been empty, he was sure of it—almost.)

The man inclined his head: “Sebastian Melmoth, at your service. One-ten Columbia Heights, Apartment
C
33.” The man took his glasses off, held them up to the sky, examining them for dust, then put them back on.

Sam said: “I think he fell over. Maybe he was drunk or crazy or . . . drunk. Maybe that's why he took his clothes off—?”

“—to piss in the river?” The man cocked his head, quizzical. “It's possible. Those guineas drink more than I do. A couple of quarts of dago red'll certainly make your spigot spout.” He looked over at Sam, suddenly sober-faced. “My name isn't really Sebastian Melmoth. Do you know who Sebastian Melmoth was?”

Sam shook his head.

“That was the name Wilde used, after he got out of Reading and was staying incognito in France. Oscar Wilde—you know,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
—‘each man kills the thing he loves'?”

“The Importance of Being Earnest,”
Sam answered.

“The importance of being earnest to be
sure!”
The man nodded deeply.

“They did that down on the school campus—the play—where I grew up.”

“School?” The man raised an eyebrow.

“The college—it's a Negro college, in North Carolina. My father works there. My mama's Dean of Women. The students put it on, three years ago, I guess. We all went to see it.”

The man threw back his head and barked a single syllable of laughter. “I'm sorry—but the idea of
The Importance of Being Earnest
in blackface—well,
not blackface. But as a minstrel—” The man's laughter fractured his own sentence. “. . . Really!” He bent forward, rocked back, recovering. “That's just awful of me. But maybe—” he turned, sincere questioning among his features nudging through the laugh's detritus—“they only used the lighter-skinned students for the—?”

“No,” Sam said, suppressing the indignation from his voice. “No, they had students of
all
colors, playing whichever part they did best. They just had to be able to speak the lines.”

“Really?” the man asked, incredulously.

Sam put his hands on his thighs, ready to stand and excuse himself. There seemed no need at all to continue this.

“You know,” the man said, sitting back again, again looking at the sky. “I would have
loved
to have seen that production! Actually, it sounds quite exciting. More than exciting—it might even have been important. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the sort of thing that
all
white people should be made to see—Shakespeare and Wilde and Ibsen, with Negro actors of all colors, taking whichever parts. It would probably do us some good!”

Surprised once more, Sam took his hands from his thighs. His sister Jules, who had played Gwendolen Fairfax (and was as light as his mother), had said much the same thing after it was over—though the part of Cecily Cardew had been taken by pudgy little black-brown Milly Potts (“Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us . . .”), who'd jazzed up the lines unmercifully, strutting and flaunting every phrase as much as it could bear and then some, rolling her eyes, shooting her hands in the air, and making the whole audience, including Papa, rock in their seats, clutch their stomachs and howl (the women's cackles cutting over and continuing after the men's bellowings)—to the point where the other actors couldn't say their own lines, trying to hold their laughter. Later, a more serious Papa had said that though it was
supposed
to be funny, it
wasn't
supposed to be funny in the way Milly had made it so. But now it was hard to think of the play any other way.

The man said: “I don't live in Apartment c 33, actually. You know what that was? That was the cell number Wilde had at Reading. ‘The
brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a—' ”

“What?” Sam asked.

“Kills the thing he loves,” the man intoned. “I was going to put c 33 on my door, once. But then I thought better. It's a nice room, though. It's right in front of Roebling's old room.”

“Roebling . . . ?”

“Washington Roebling. He's the man who made this bridge.” The man raised his head, to take in caging cables. “Who hung these lines here?
He
took over the job from his father, John Augustus Roebling. The Bridge killed his father, John, you know. He'd already completed the plans and was at the waterfront, surveying to start the work—when a runaway cart sliced open his foot. It became infected until, three weeks later, tetanus did him in—with spasms that near broke his bones, with crying out for water. So the son, Washington, took it up. The problem, you see, was to dig the foundations out for those great stone towers.” The man gestured left, then right. “How to excavate them, there in the water, the both of them, with those gigantic dredging machines. They had to dig out, beneath the river, two areas a hundred-seventy-two feet by a hundred-two—for each about a third the size of a football field! You know how they did it? They built two immense, upside-down iron and wooden boxes. The bottoms—or, better, the roofs—were made of five layers of foot-square pine timbers, bolted together. They caulked them within an inch of their lives, covered them over with sheet tin, then covered over the whole with wood again. Then they dropped those upside-down caissons into the drink, with the air still in them. They let the workers down through shafts that were pressurized to keep the air in and the water out. Working on the bottom, the poor bohunks and square-heads they had in there dredged out muck and mud till they hit bedrock—seventy-eight feet six inches below the high-tide line on the Manhattan side and forty-four feet six inches below on the Brooklyn side. The workers had a nine-foot high space to dig in, all propped up with six-by-six beams. The pressure was immense—and they used what they called clamshell buckets to haul out the dredgings. Right at the very beginning, young Roebling was down in the caissons inspecting—came
up too fast and got the bends. He was a cripple for the rest of his life. So he stayed in the room at the back of where I live now, surveying the work through the window with a telescope and directing it through his wife—the bridge—who went down to the docks every day to bring his orders and take back her report: spying through his glass at the stanchions he'd raised—twin gnomons swinging their shadows around the face of the sound, insistently marking out his days, till new navigators remap those voyages to and beyond love's peripheries, till another alphabet, another hunt can reconfigure the word. There're twenty corpses down under those towers. When it was all done, they poured concrete through the air shafts into the work space, filled it up, sealed it down to the bedrock. Twenty corpses, at least—”

“They buried the men in the caissons?” Sam asked, surprised.

“I'm speaking figuratively. Some twenty workers died in the bridge's construction—and do you know, no one is really sure of their names? I like to think of those towers as their tombstones. This one falling from the top of some steam-powered boom derrick, that one hit in the head by a swinging beam. I see them, buried, all twenty, in those hypogea at the river bottom, while the stanchions' shadows sweep away the years between their deaths and the sea's mergence with the sun, while the noon signal sirens all the dead swimmers through the everyday . . .” For a moment he was pensive. (Uncomfortable Sam thought again of the . . . Italian fisherman?) “Everybody always talks about John Augustus—a kraut, you see,” the man went on. “There's nothing dumber than a dumb kraut, but there's nothing smarter than a smart one—we all know that. The war taught it to us if it taught us anything. John built bridges all over kingdom come: over the Allegheney, over the Monongahela, over Niagara Falls, the Ohio—each runs under a Roebling bridge. You'd think, sometimes, he was out to build a single bridge across the whole of the country. And the plans for this one were, yes, his. But I want to write the life of Washington. (Don't think it's an accident John named his son after our good first president!)” Again, he nodded deeply. “Roebling—Washington A. Roebling—
was
this bridge; this bridge was Washington Roebling. He was born into it, through his father: every
rivet and cable you see around us sings of him. Write such a life? It shouldn't be too hard. To get the feel of it, all I have to do is to go into the back room, look out the window, and imagine . . . 
this
, cable by cable, rising over the river.”

When the man was quiet, Sam said with some enthusiasm: “The plaque says the bridge was opened to traffic in 1883. That's the year they started the first commercial electricity in New York City and Hartford, Connecticut!” because, along with and among his magic and tricks, Sam had lots of such informations—like the sixty stories of the Woolworth Building—and this was a man who might appreciate it.

“
Really
—?” the young man asked, conveying more surprise than was reasonable.

“That's right.”

“In May it was—since you're being so particular—the very month we're in: on the twenty-fourth, that's when they started to roll and stroll across. Though your plaque doesn't say
that!
Nor does it say how, on the first day, when they opened the walkway here to the curious hordes, going down those steps there a woman tripped and screamed—and the crowds, thinking the whole structure was collapsing, stampeded. Twelve people were trampled to death. It's a strange bridge, a dangerous bridge in its way; things happen here. I mean things in your mind—” a wicked smile behind his glasses gave way to a warm one—“that you wouldn't ordinarily think of.” The man held out his hand. “My name's Harold. Harold Hart. People call me Hart. A few folks—especially in the family—call me Harry. But I'm becoming Hart more and more these days.”