Goodbye, Columbus (5 page)

Suddenly it was nine o’clock and everything was scurrying. Wobbly-heeled girls revolved through the doors of the telephone building across the way, traffic honked desperately, policeman barked, whistled, and waved motorists to and fro. Over at St. Vincent’s Church the huge dark portals swung back and those bleary-eyes that had risen early for Mass now blinked at the light. Then the worshipers had stepped off the church steps and were racing down the streets towards desks, riling cabinets, secretaries, bosses, and—if the Lord had seen fit to remove a mite of harshness from their lives—to the comfort of air-conditioners pumping at their windows. I got up and crossed over to the library, wondering if Brenda was awake yet.

The pale cement lions stood unconvincing guard on the library steps, suffering their usual combination of elephantiasis and arteriosclerosis, and I was prepared to pay them as little attention as I had for the past eight months were it not for a small colored boy who stood in front of one of them. The lion had lost all of its toes the summer before to a safari of juvenile delinquents, and now a new tormentor stood before him, sagging a little in his knees, and growling. He would growl, low and long, drop back, wait, then growl again. Then he would straighten up, and, shaking his head, he would say to the lion, “Man, you’s a coward …” Then, once again, he’d growl.

The day began the same as any other. From behind the desk on the main floor, I watched the hot high-breasted teen-age girls walk twitchingly up the wide flight of marble stairs that led to the main reading room. The stairs were an imitation of a staircase somewhere in Versailles, though in their toreador pants and sweaters these young daughters of Italian leatherworkers, Polish brewery hands, and Jewish furriers were hardly duchesses. They were not Brenda either, and any lust that sparked inside me through the dreary day was academic and time-passing. I looked at my watch occasionally, thought of Brenda, and waited for lunch and then for after lunch, when I would take over the Information Desk upstairs and John McKee, who was only twenty-one but wore elastic bands around his sleeves, would march starchily down the stairs to work assiduously at stamping books in and out. John McRubberbands was in his last year at Newark State Teachers College where he was studying at the Dewey Decimal System in preparation for his lifework. The library was not going to be my lif ework, I knew it. Yet, there had been some talk—from Mr. Scapello, an old eunuch who had learned somehow to disguise his voice as a man’s—that when I returned from my summer vacation I would be put in charge of the Reference Room, a position that had been empty ever since that morning when Martha Winney had fallen off a high stool in the Encyclopedia Room and shattered all those frail bones that come together to form what in a woman half her age we would call the hips.

I had strange fellows at the library and, in truth, there were many hours when I never quite knew how I’d gotten there or why I stayed. But I did stay and after a while waited patiently for that day when I would go into the men’s room on the main floor for a cigarette and, studying myself as I expelled smoke into the mirror, would see that at some moment during the morning I had gone pale, and that under my skin, as under McKee’s and Scapello’s and Miss Winney’s, there was a thin cushion of air separating the blood from the flesh. Someone had pumped it there while I was stamping out a book, and so life from now on would be not a throwing off, as it was for Aunt Gladys, and not a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off a numbness I began to fear this, and yet, in my muscleless devotion to my work seemed edging towards it, silently as Miss Winney used to edge up to the
Britannica
. Her stool was empty now and awaited me.

Just before lunch the lion tamer came wide-eyed into the library. He stood still for a moment, only his fingers moving, as though he were counting the number of marble stairs before him. Then he walked creepily about on the marble floor, snickering at the clink of his taps and the way his little noise swelled up to the vaulted ceiling. Otto, the guard at the door, told him to make less noise with his shoes, but that did not seem to bother the little boy. He clacked on his tiptoes, high, secretively, delighted at the opportunity Otto had given him to practice this posture. He tiptoed up to me.

“Hey,” he said, “where’s the heart section?”

“The what?” I said.

“The heart section. Ain’t you got no heart section?”

He had the thickest sort of southern Negro dialect and the only word that came clear to me was the one that sounded like heart.

“How do you spell it?” I said.

“
Heart.
Man, pictures. Drawing books. Where you got them?”

“You mean art books? Reproductions?”

He took my polysyllabic word for it. “Yea, they’s them.”

“In a couple places,” I told him. “Which artist are you interested in?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed so that his whole face seemed black. He started backing away, as he had from the lion. “All of them …” he mumbled.

“That’s okay,” I said. “You go look at whichever ones you want. The next flight up. Follow the arrow to where it says Stack Three. You remember that? Stack Three. Ask somebody upstairs.”

He did not move; he seemed to be taking my curiosity about his taste as a kind of poll-tax investigation. “Go ahead,” I said, slashing my face with a smile, “right up there …”

And like a shot he was scuffling and tapping up towards the heart section.

After lunch I came back to the in-and-out desk and there was John McKee, waiting, in his pale blue slacks, his black shoes, his barber-cloth shirt with the elastic bands, and a great knit tie, green, wrapped into a Windsor knot, that was huge and jumped when he talked. His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the comers of his mouth. I did not like him and at times had the urge to yank back on his armbands and slingshoot him out past Otto and the lions into the street.

“Has a little Negro boy passed the desk? With a thick accent? He’s been hiding in the art books all morning. You know what those boys
do
in there.”

“I saw him come in, John.”

“So did I. Has he gone
out
though.”

“I haven’t noticed. I guess so.”

“Those are
very
expensive books.”

“Don’t be so nervous, John. People are supposed to touch them.”

“There is touching,” John said sententiously, “and there is touching. Someone should check on him. I was afraid to leave the desk here. You know the way they treat the housing projects we give them.”

“You give them?”

“The city. Have you seen what they do at Seth Boyden? They threw
beer
bottles, those big ones, on the
lawn.
They’re taking over the city.”

“Just the Negro sections.”

“It’s easy to laugh, you don’t live near them. I’m going to call Mr. Scapello’s office to check the Art Section. Where did he ever find out about art?”

“You’ll give Mr. Scapello an ulcer, so soon after his egg-and-pepper sandwich. I’ll check, I have to go upstairs anyway.”

“You know what they do in there,” John warned me.

“Don’t worry, Johnny,
they’re
the ones who’ll get warts on their dirty little hands.”

“Ha ha. Those books happen to cost—”

So that Mr. Scapello would not descend upon the boy with his chalky fingers, I walked up the three flights to Stack Three, past the receiving room where rheumy-eyed Jimmy Boylen, our fifty-one-year-old boy, unloaded books from a cart; past the reading room, where bums off Mulberry Street slept over
Popular Mechanics;
past the smoking corridor where damp-browed summer students from the law school relaxed, some smoking, others trying to rub the colored dye from their tort texts off their fingertips; and finally, past the periodical room, where a few ancient ladies who’d been motored down from Upper Montclair now huddled in their chairs, pince-nezing over yellowed, fraying society pages in old old copies of the Newark
News.
Up on Stack Three I found the boy. He was seated on the glass-brick floor holding an open book in his lap, a book, in fact, that was bigger than his lap and had to be propped up by his knees. By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair. He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat The lips were parted, the eves wide, and even the ears seemed to have a heightened receptivity! He looked ecstatic—until he saw me, that is. For all he knew I was John McKee.

“That’s okay,” I said before he could even move, “I’m just passing through. You read.”

“Ain’t nothing
to
read. They’s pictures.”

“Fine.” I fished around the lowest shelves a moment, playing at work.

“Hey, mister,” the boy said after a minute, “where is this?”

“Where is what?”

“Where is these pictures? These people, man, they sure does look cool. They ain’t no yelling or shouting here, you could just see it.”

He lifted the book so I could see. It was an expensive large-sized edition of Gauguin reproductions. The page he had been looking at showed an 8½12 × 11 print, in color, of three native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream. It
was
a silent picture, he was right.

“That’s Tahiti. That’s an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

“That ain’t no place you could go, is it? Like a ree-sort?”

“You could go there, I suppose. It’s very far. People live there …”

“Hey,
look,
look here at this one.” He flipped back to a page where a young brown-skinned maid was leaning forward on her knees, as though to dry her hair. “Man,” the boy said, “that’s the fuckin life.” The euphoria of his diction would have earned him eternal banishment from the Newark Public Library and its branches had John or Mr. Scapello—or, God forbid, the hospitalized Miss Winney—come to investigate.

“Who took these pictures?” he asked me.

“Gauguin. He didn’t take them, he painted them. Paul Gauguin. He was a Frenchman.”

“Is he a white man or a colored man?”

“He’s white.”

“Man,” the boy smiled, chuckled almost, “I knew that. He don’t
take
pictures like no colored men would. He’s a good picture taker …
Look, look,
look here at this one. Ain’t that the fuckin
life?
”

I agreed it was and left.

Later I sent Jimmy Boylen hopping down the stairs to tell McKee that everything was all right. The rest of the day was uneventful. I sat at the Information Desk thinking about Brenda and reminding myself that that evening I would have to get gas before I started up to Short Hills, which I could see now, in my mind’s eye, at dusk, rose-colored, like a Gauguin stream.

When I pulled up to the Patimkin house that night, everybody but Julie was waiting for me on the front porch: Mr. and Mrs., Ron, and Brenda, wearing a dress. I had not seen her in a dress before and for an instant she did not look like the same girl. But that was only half the surprise. So many of those Lincolnesque college girls turn out to be limbed for shorts alone. Not Brenda. She looked, in a dress, as though she’d gone through life so attired, as though she’d never worn shorts, or bathing suits, or pajamas, or anything but that pale linen dress. I walked rather bouncingly up the lawn, past the huge weeping willow, towards the waiting Patimkins, wishing all the while that I’d had my car washed. Before I’d even reached them, Ron stepped forward and shook my hand, vigorously, as though he hadn’t seen me since the Diaspora. Mrs. Patimkin smiled and Mr. Patimkin grunted something and continued twitching his wrists before him, then raising an imaginary golf club and driving a ghost of a golf ball up and away towards the Orange Mountains, that are called Orange, I’m convinced, because in that various suburban light that’s the
only
color they do not come dressed in.

“We’ll be right back,” Brenda said to me. “You have to sit with Julie. Carlota’s off.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We’re taking Ron to the airport.”

“Okay.”

“Julie doesn’t want to go. She says Ron pushed her in the pool this afternoon. We’ve been waiting for you, so we don’t miss Ron’s plane. Okay?”

“
Okay.
”

Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin and Ron moved off, and I flashed Brenda just the hint of a glare. She reached out and took my hand a moment.

“How do you like me?” she said.

“You’re great to baby-sit for. Am I allowed all the milk and cake I want?”

“Don’t be angry, baby. We’ll be right back.” Then she waited a moment, and when I failed to deflate the pout from my mouth, she gave
me
a glare, no hints about it. “I
meant
how do you like me in a dress!” Then she ran off towards the Chrysler, trotting in her high heels like a colt.

When I walked into the house, I slammed the screen door behind me.

“Close the other door too,” a little voice shouted. “The air-conditioning.”

I closed the other door, obediently.

“Neil?” Julie called.

“Yes.”

“Hi. Want to play five and two?”

“No.”