Atlantis: Three Tales (2 page)

But why did that make him remember, how many days before, Lewy, arguing with—well, discussing with—Mama, in an extraordinarily grown-up manner, how going north would be good for him—while
Sam sat, silent, impressed, across the kitchen table, listening to them go on earnestly for fifteen minutes, as though he weren't there.

For moments Sam thought again about the memory he didn't have—because he'd dozed through it: that moment, on leaving Washington, when the Jim Crow car in which he'd started out had become a car like any other, along with all the white cars on the train; and he and anyone in it could sit anywhere they wanted. Immediately on waking, with half a dozen others already up and collecting things, though it was after one o'clock in the morning, he'd gotten his two cases and moved. Sprawled against each other, the white man and the barefoot children slept on. Beside the biggest boy, who wore shoes like his parents, the white woman gazed at the black window. At her shoulder, the blue-eyed child stared up, as Sam pushed, sideways, by.

Then there'd been the porter, whom, while he'd been exploring the train last night, Sam had caught smoking in the vestibule between cars; the two of them had stood in the chill chamber and had cigarettes together. The porter—whose name was John Brown, like his friend John at home—had
not
said:
Ain't you too young to smoke
,
boy?
He'd said: “I'm usually on the Chicago-Calgary run—but I got deflected. I got to get me home to Chicago; eventually, somehow. That's where my girlfriend live.” He'd chuckled as the night's iced air whipped and snapped smoke back from the dark shelves of his lips. Sam told him about his friends, John and Lewy, and how John's name was the same as his. “My daddy,” the porter said, “he was just John Brown crazy. Back when Dr. DuBois' book come out, he made me read the whole thing out loud to him.” Sam laughed, and told him how his father had read it out loud to
his
whole family too—though he'd not been five years old; and often in bed. But he remembered lying awake, listening. Then the porter told Sam he'd just read another book about Brown by someone named Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the editor of a magazine. Sam didn't remember the magazine's name, but he remembered Oswald Garrison Villard because it sounded so eccentric he'd laughed.

How could a memory of laughter make you smile now? But, turning away from the window, Sam smiled.

Four seats ahead was the middle-aged white woman who'd started three different conversations with him—the first on the train platform yesterday at noon, then twice more since Washington—the third even after he'd told her, during the second, that he was Negro. Now, she was fixing her wide, ivory hat to salted auburn, with one, then another, then a third (taking them from between her teeth) pearl-tipped hatpin. She'd said she was Scottish and lived in Flatbush—in the heart of Brooklyn. He'd said that, just the morning he'd left, his older sister, Jules, had decided the vat of soap out back of the house had bleached enough to slice loose some half dozen cakes, wrap them in waxed paper, and send them in Sam's wicker trunk to his brothers and sisters in New York. (Holding a fold of her apron, there'd been Jules, in the yard, looking at the soap tray, eyes narrowed, lips pursed; she was comparing it with Mama's or Elsie's, he knew. What she really wanted was to get to her piano lessons with the little girls who'd start coming in at one—almost an hour after he'd be on the train. When would he hear Jules in the parlor, guiding scales again?) The white woman had said
she'd
made her own soap for a while, but it wasn't worth it—there in Brooklyn. At Borough Hall she could get either subway or trolley into Manhattan, and a general store not three streets away from where she lived sold bars of store soap any time she wanted it.

Ivory, like it said in the advertisements, was the best. He'd looked down at the flounce on her skirt, to see if he could glimpse an ankle—another memory.

Sam thought about going to inquire of her now. (Ankles of ivory. Ankles like moons . . . ) But finally (for now was gone) he went back to ask John Brown, who, in his blue-black uniform, was just coming down through the car: “Sir, we in New York State yet?”

Seemingly constructed of blue-black coal, Brown's face turned in mild surprise: “Well, we just gone by Hell Gate.” And with that damnable dawn news, John Brown stepped around him, to move on between plush seat backs, bending here, leaning there, asking the older passengers if they would need help with any of their bags—the older white passengers, anyway, Sam noted: a stately Negro woman, with black hat
and veil, blue coat frayed at the shoulders, and doubtless going to a funeral—well, the porter, like a dog avoiding another dog's tree, had walked
right
around her!

Sam breathed.

If Mama had been with him, she'd have muttered, “. . . no-account!” then told Sam to go immediately to that woman and offer a hand: and would probably say something cutting to the porter. Mama could get quite self-righteous over the behavior of other Negroes she didn't approve of—as if she carried responsibility for the whole race on her issue-free shoulders. Sam started to go to her—then remembered his own, two large cases, one leather, one wicker. Well, when he got them off and Hubert was there, he'd go
back
and help.

Out the window a snarl of underpasses and stuttering sunlight became a tunnel, through which they roared a long time: the light from the white glass shades every two seats took on the yellowish cast they'd had at night.

Genitals, buttocks, nipples, tongue all seemed so insistently present inside Sam's mouth and twenty-four-hour-worn suit. Once, well back before dawn, when the train windows were still black and the other passengers slept, he had stared at one white round glass, thinking of the moon, when, at once, he'd stood, to bring his mouth closer and closer, as if to kiss this night light at the aisle's end, pulling back only when the heat about burned his lips. He'd seen the Scotswoman from Brooklyn—she
would
be the one awake—turn away too, smiling. (Why do something like that? And, if you did, why remember it?) No, he didn't want to speak to her.

The tunnel went on at alarming length.

Then the white conductor ambled through, calling, “Grand Central Terminal coming up! Change trains for
aaaaall
connections! Grand Central Terminal . . . !” and people stood to haul their bags down from the overhead rack; men squatted in the aisle to lift them from under the seats. It wasn't yet eight in the morning.

And the train itself, he thought, will be only memory in moments: “. . . tut-tut-tut-tut . . .” Then he was lugging his cases down onto the rectangular stool the porter had kicked out the train's door, its squared wooden corners clucking cement.

As Sam stood on the platform among debarking passengers, swaying with the train's remembered sway, Hubert, in his tan-wool overcoat, pushed up in front of him. A grin started out on Sam's face. Then, as suddenly, confusion tore it away—because Hubert was focused all behind him, even before either of them could say hello.

“Here, ma'am! I'll get that for you!” Hubert said to someone beyond Sam's shoulder—which, as Sam turned, he realized was the ponderous woman in mourning.

“Just a minute now, ma'am,” which was John Brown, who, at Hubert's intervention, had become as solicitous of her as if she'd been queen of the car's whole hive, handing the heavy creature firmly down to the stool, passing her three bags one after another to Hubert, who swung them, over its metal rail, up on the broad cart with the other baggage that the porter from the sleeping car was loading for the redcaps clustered up at the platform's head.

Hubert was asking her if everything were all right. She was saying, in subdued tones, in an accent that put her well to the west of Raleigh: “Why, thank ya—thank ya, young gen'l'man. Ah'm Mrs. Callista Arkady and Ah'm goin' to the funeral of mah son. It's so kind of y'all to help a bereaved mother. Thank ya—God'll thank y'all. Thank y'all so much!”

Before turning off, the porter leaned over to Sam, to explain softly, sullenly, snappishly: “She didn't tip me none! When she first got on the
JC, yesterday, I took as much time with her as with anybody else—I did!” John Brown's accent was considerably to the north. “But she didn't tip me. You don't got enough to pay your tips, you don't ride the train! Even niggers got to know that!”

“Yes, but she's still a—” he was about to say “lady,” while he wondered should he give John Brown a nickel. (That's what John D. Rockefeller tipped
his
train porter; it had said so in a northern magazine.) Of course the porter hadn't touched Sam's bags at all—and, as well, he'd swung back up into the car by now to help the other, white, and—certainly—better heeled passengers.

The woman plowed—mournfully—up the platform through the packs of porters and debarkees, when Hubert turned back to him:

“Well, now—Sam! And how are
you
there—” to clap him on both shoulders, then, with his blue bow tie and buttoned-up double breasted showing between tan coat flaps, to give Sam a bear-like, brotherly hug. “So you got here after all!” In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. “How's everybody down at the school?”

Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart—far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. “Mama's fine, Papa's fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin' him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!”

Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train's several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother's knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there'd been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday's consuming sea.

Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades,
insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he'd heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over . . . well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! “Hubert,” Sam asked, “
where
is the sky . . . ?” thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the—after all—ridiculous question.

But at the ramp's end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They'd stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. “They put that there—for folks like you.”

Sam looked.

The hall's arched ceiling was watery blue—tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter's triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head.

Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns.

Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight—a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing from spurious waters, if not the pointer on some turn and bank
indicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war's close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he'd watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet—blam! blam!—on the earth's red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others, swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the field's edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes.