Atlantis: Three Tales (19 page)

“No—well, maybe I was. I'm not sure. But I woke up thinking about it.” Outside the window, clotheslines hung like lapping lariats that, beyond the frame, would encincture night to day. “Can't you tell me what it was, Hubert? So I'll know? I was just nine or ten, and Jules or Laura wouldn't tell me anything. Jules—I don't think she really knew what it was about either—but she said if I was that curious, I should ask Papa. But I was afraid to. I thought if it was that awful, if I asked about it he might do the same thing to me. At least that's what I thought then.”

“Yeah, maybe he would have—no.” Hubert humphed. “It was just stuff . . . with a girl.” He pursed his lips, debating whether to say more. “You remember Alina, Reverend Fitzgarn's daughter?” Hubert took a breath, the moonlit admission clearly difficult. “I stole some of Papa's money, to go out and get a bottle and be with her. And then Reverend Fitzgarn caught the two of us, doing it—or, least ways, just
about
doing it. And he came raging to Papa that he would have me locked up by the police if Papa didn't do something himself—and Papa was embarrassed as all get out, at least at first; then he got real mad because I'd shamed him. Then, when he got back to the house, he found out I'd stolen from him too. Five dollars.”

“Alina Fitzgarn?”

“
Um-hm
. Look—just a second, I got to go to the toilet. You be all right?”

Sam nodded.

His arms and back gone from ivory to—with his next step—cadaverous
gray, Hubert went out through the hall door. Limen to lintel, like a species of mystery, black filled the space ajar. Sam's fingertips tingled on the quilt. He moved his foot over, beneath the covers, from where it had thrust, on his waking and turning, into cold bedding. Outside in the hall, water gushed into the commode.

Hubert came back in and pushed the door closed behind him. “I'm gonna have to get me a chamber pot—this getting up and having to go out to pee in the morning
every
morning at—” he reached into his pants to pull out the pocketwatch Mama had sent him for Christmas (but it had arrived three days late), and held it up—“nearly ten to four!—just isn't going to make it. At least not in this weather.” He dropped the watch from its chain—so that it swung in the light, turning and unturning—and burlesqued a shiver. “It's cold out there! I guess—” He swung up the watch and caught it, white-gold flashing in the moon, and dropped his hand toward his pants pocket—“I'm starting to turn into an old man!” (Hubert liked that watch, Sam knew. But each time Hubert took it out, Sam felt not so much jealous of the object as he did simply at sea, himself not knowing the hour.) Hubert had stopped in the middle of the floor on the same spot he'd stood before. In moments he seemed to have settled back into the same discomfort. Hubert took a long, considered breath. At last he said: “Papa didn't let me stay outside all night, you know. He turned me loose—after he wore himself and that orange crate out. He made me come inside and sit in his study—my nose was bleeding, my arm was sore—and he talked to me. I can remember it, I can see him just as clear, behind his desk. He said we had to call a truce, him and me. He said we had to call a truce between us—that if we didn't, he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him. If I didn't drive him to his grave with shame and sorrow, I was going to do it with a gun or my hands. Or worse, he'd have to kill me first. ‘You want to go to New York,' he said, ‘with Hap and Corey?' I hardly heard what he was saying, when he said it. I mean, after he'd just about murdered me, it was like he'd turned around and offered me a present. What I'd expected him to say was that I wouldn't be allowed to go out of the house and had to stay in my room and eat bread and water for the next
three months—or something like that. He said, ‘You want to go to New York . . . ?' ” Hubert reached up across his bony chest to rub his arm with his hand. “You see, Papa's a strong-headed man. I guess he had to be, to do what he's done—working at the school, be a minister to all those Negroes down home, get himself elected bishop. But he's got some strong-headed children too. And he's smart enough to know you can't have all these strong-headed people living under one roof—not ten or twelve of us. Not
that
many. So that's why I came up here. He loves us, you know. It's taken me a while to figure that one out. But he does.” Hubert dropped his hand, took a breath. “Look—if you want to talk about this some more, let's do it in the morning. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” Sam said. “All right.”

As Hubert walked into his own room, Sam settled back down in the bed. Very much awake, he pulled the covers to his chin. Even if he didn't know what might happen in the vestibules of subway cars during rush hour, or what was worse than passing water or doing your business, though some of his ideas about it might have surprised Hubert, Sam
did
know—more or less—what “doing it” was. And he knew it was a pretty bad thing even to think about, especially for a bishop's son—and even more so with a minister's daughter. Alina Fitzgarn? He could hardly remember what she looked like, except that she was dark and quiet and had been a good friend of Milly's, till her parents had sent her away. Did her going away have anything to do, Sam wondered suddenly, with Hubert?

For a while Sam thought about getting out all his magic tricks, new and old, to look them over in the moonlight. But the rectangle of light, that had flooded the rose rug like white oil and lay half on the wall, did not touch the bed. Maybe he should put on his long johns, turn on the light, take
Weird Tales
from the top drawer, sit over in the wing chair, and read the first installment of Houdini . . . ? (But would he remember it clearly enough when he got the next issue? Lewy read everything right away, then read it again and could tell you all the contradictions between the various parts and didn't mind at all if you told him what happened next in the story. Sam reread the stories but couldn't spot the contradictions
to save himself. And John wouldn't let you tell him anything, though he could get real excited and had a hard time not telling
you
.) Finally Sam pushed back the covers, stood up, and stepped—naked—to the window.

For four, five, ten seconds he looked at the black windowframe across the alley. Then he pulled the drape and curtain from where he'd put it back over the wing chair's edge (odd that Hubert had never commented on it; but then, in his family, there were so many things they somehow didn't talk about) to let it swing before the glass, cutting out most of the light.

Then Sam turned, bent his knees, and jumped for the bed, to land in a crouch on the thin mattress, springs shrieking beneath (from inside Hubert said:
“Sam . . . ?”
), grabbed up the covers and shoved his feet under the quilt, to slide down between the sheets' pools and puddles of warmth and chill, shivering on his back for seconds, clutching the covers to his chin, grinning. (Suppose she'd been awake, in her dark room, looking toward her window. Had she seen him in his, in the moonlight . . . naked?) He lay awake a long time, in wait for morning.

A month later, Sam had lost much of the business about the building of the bridge—though, for a while, working in Mr. Harris's basement, he tried and tried to recall it. In September, Lewy sent him another letter, apologizing for not having forwarded the next two installments of
Imprisoned With the Pharaohs
, though he was certain by now it wasn't really by Houdini at all. That same week Sam started night school. Mr. DeCourtenay, his English teacher, went on at such lengths in the first class about how important it was that they expose themselves only to the finest and greatest of what had been written in English literature, Sam was pretty sure Mr. DeCourtenay didn't want them reading anything written in America at all—and certainly not if it had been written since nineteen hundred. But why go to school if—this time—he wasn't going to take it seriously? So he put all ideas of adventure magazines out of his mind—which seemed to be featuring less and less of the Eastern, Egyptian, and Arabian stories he liked, anyway.

Eleven years later in the sixth year of the Depression, a partner in his own floundering Harlem haberdashery, Sam found a book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and, reading it, recalled a surprising amount about it; but, a week after, had forgotten much of it again; and again tried to remember. After eighteen years, when, in his second marriage, he would have his first son, also named Sam, he finally forgot the last fragments of what had happened on the bridge in between—the young man with his ravings, the rower in the boat below.

For a while, though, he
did
remember sitting naked on his bed, cross-legged, late at night, the curtains pulled back, fingering magic tricks in the moonlight, after Hubert had come home from arguing with some friends after classes and Sam had finally asked him about what had happened back home, all those years ago, when Papa got so mad he'd chained Hubert to the water pump. But, by then, of course, he'd confused that first evening with another several months on.

Well before that, however, he forgot the white woman on the train. He forgot the black woman across the alley.

But, as he always remembered the fields at the bridge's Brooklyn end, he always remembered

though, during the rest of his life, he spoke of them only seven or eight times, all when visiting cities in which he did not live, and only if talking to strangers.

—Amherst / Ann Arbor / New York
November 1992–June 1993

 

 

 

 

“It has never bothered me a bit when people say that what I am doing is not art,” Rauschenberg told me. “I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.”

Well, so much for euphoria.

—Calvin Tomkins,
Post- to Neo-

I remember standing beside my father's knee, while, in his blue-black suit, he sat at the mahogany kitchen table and taught me to sing,
“Mairzy doats and dozy doats an little lambsy divey. A kidledy divey too
—
wouldn't you?”
It came out, when you actually sang it, “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy . . .”

And at her club meeting, for the assembled women in their hats and long-sleeved winter dresses sitting about our living room, my mother would urge me, with my boy soprano, to Rose Murphy's “I wanna be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you . . . 
Poo-poo-pa-doop!
” till held-in laughter broke out along the green couch and wooden bridge chairs, among the gloves and hat veils.

Was I the same age? From black, twelve-inch 78 rpms, slipped from the brown wrapping-paper envelopes in their colorful book-like album covers (unlike my father's extensive jazz collection, from
Rhapsody in
Blue
unto the real thing:
their
covers were blue or maroon, every one, with white or pink dots), I lay on the living room's rose rug and memorized
Peter and the Wolf
and (on the rag rug before the fireplace up at our country place)
Tubby the Tuba
and (back in New York) a children's opera,
The Emperor's New Clothes
. But all this was driven from current obsession when, in the city one autumn, Mom took me to see a little theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan's
Pirates of Penzance
. An obsessed month later I'd talked Dad into buying me the D'Oyly Carte album with Martin Greene as Major General Stanley (the
first
thirty-three-and-a-third rpm long-playing records we owned); and I'd sing along with the verbal intricacies of the very model of a modern major general's patter.

Years before, from among many on the radio, I'd learned a song. It went:

Younger than springtime are you.
Gayer than laughter are you.
Angel and lover, heaven and earth
Are you to me . . . 

A year or so after my trip to hear the Gilbert and Sullivan, an afternoon radio program called
Spot the Hits
became popular for a season. New songs aired on it, and a “panel of experts” discussed, with the composer, its chances of making the Hit Parade. While I was playing in the upstairs nursery one day,
Spot the Hits
was on the radio, and, from the three-piece orchestra and studio tenor, a pretty song wafted over the blocks and erector-set pieces spread around me:

Maid of music are you.
Maid of starlight are you . . . 

When it was over, several of the experts (in those pre-rock 'n' roll days) allowed as how it was lyrical, engaging, and likely for success.

“But,” objected one, as it struck him, “the melody is identical to ‘Younger than Springtime'!” He sang the opening lines from first one song, then the other.

It was.

The composer who'd written the tune spluttered that he'd been entirely unaware of the similarity. The program's moderator spluttered; and there was a minute of that awkward confusion which occasionally plagued live radio and, later, live
TV
. I was convinced then, and still am, that the plagiarism was inadvertent. But despite my conviction, or perhaps because of it, the moment has remained indelible.

And that winter my cousin Betty and her boyfriend Wendell took me to an indoor ice skating rink somewhere in the city. After renting skates, with Wendell and Betty at either elbow, I made fair progress around the rink while the electric calliope played “Buckle Down, Winsockie,” to which Wendell sang the lyrics, till finally I could move about the ice on my own.