Of Time and the River (82 page)
Eugene went down to the office and told them what had happened. The night clerk, a fat, shuffling old man with a mild, pasty face, and the black African negro who was at the telephone-board, received the news with astonishing calmness and matter of factness, and then acted with admirable coolness, speed and quiet precision, of which Eugene often thought in the months that followed, because it revealed to him a kind of secret knowledge, a hidden seriousness in the hotel’s working, and it showed, moreover, how much knowledge, ability, and decision may be stored behind the faces of inept and foolish-looking men.
Eugene looked at the clock above the office desk: it was now ten minutes after three o’clock in the morning. Within twenty minutes they had an ambulance, a doctor, and two stretcher-bearers at the hotel; the doctor, a young Jew with a little moustache, walked quietly and casually into the room, with the ends of a stethoscope fastened in his ears. Eugene thought that Upshaw was already dead! His face had the upthrust marble rigidity of death, but after a moment’s examination the doctor spoke quietly to the two men with him, they put the stretcher on the floor and laid the withered little figure on it. As they started to move out of the room Upshaw’s arms began to flop and jerk stiffly and grotesquely with every step they took: at another word from the doctor they put their burden on the floor again, the doctor knelt swiftly, unknotted the cravat in Upshaw’s collar and loosely tied his wrists together. Then they all went out, and Martha followed, holding Upshaw’s hat. She rode over in the ambulance to the hospital, which was only a few blocks away in Fifteenth Street. Robert and Eugene followed in a taxi; there was no one on the streets, the buildings and the pavements had the hard, bare angularity they have early in the morning: they waited downstairs in a little room until shortly after five o’clock in the morning, when Martha came down to see them and to tell them that Upshaw had just died.
Then Eugene left Robert and Martha there together and walked back towards the hotel. The streets were still bare, but in the east there was the first width of morning light, cold steel-grey, harsh and sharply clean: day was beginning to break, and he could hear the rumbling jingle of a milk-wagon and the sound of hoof and wheel behind him in the lonely street.
LV
If the hard and rugged lineaments of Abe’s character had not at this time emerged out of the glutinous paste of obscure yearnings, there was no such indecision and uncertainty in the character of his mother. It was as legible as gold, as solid as a rock.
Abe’s mother was an old woman, with the powerful and primitive features of the aged Jewess: she was almost toothless, a solitary blackened tooth stood mournfully in the centre of her strong ruined mouth; she had a craggy worn face, seamed and furrowed by a countless sorrow, a powerful beaked nose, and a strong convulsive mouth, a mask which was like a destiny, since it seemed to have been carved and fashioned for the dirge-like wailing of eternal grief. The face of the old woman might have served not only as the painting of the whole history of her race, but as the painting of the female everywhere—not the female with her ephemeral youth, her brief snares of hair and hide, her succulent burst of rose-lips and flowing curve—but the female timeless, ageless, fixed in sorrow and fertility, as savage, as enduring, and as fecund as the earth. The old woman’s face was like a worn rock at which all the waves of life had smashed and beaten: it was unmistakably the face of an old Jewess and yet the powerful and craggy features bore an astonishing resemblance to the face of a pioneer woman or of an old Indian chief.
Her life, moreover, had the agelessness of the earth, the timelessness of her race and destiny: she had not been touched at all by the furious and savage life of the city with its sensational brevities, its hard, special, temporal qualities of speech, fashion, and belief, its million ephemeral enthusiasms, briefly held and forgotten, the stunned oblivion of its memory, which, in the brutal stupefaction of a thousand days, can hold to nothing, so that even the memory of love and death cannot endure there and a man may forget his dead brother ere his flesh grow rotten in the grave.
The old woman did not forget: for her, as for the God she worshipped, the passing of seven thousand years was like the passing of a single day; yesterday, tomorrow, and for ever, a moment at the heart of love and memory. Thus, once when Eugene had called Abe upon the telephone, a full year after the death of his oldest brother, Jacob, the old woman had answered: the old voice came feebly, brokenly, indecipherably, and was like a wail. He asked for Abe, she could not understand, she began to talk in an excited, toothless mumble—a torrent of Yiddish broken here and there by a few mangled words and scraps of English—all she knew. At length Eugene made her understand he wanted to speak to Abe: suddenly she recognized his voice and remembered him. Then, instantly, as if it had happened only the day before and as if he had been a friend of her dead son, although he had never known him, the old woman began to wail, faintly and rhythmically, across the wire: “Jakie! . . . My Jakie! . . . Mein Sohn Jakie! . . . He is dead.”
A few days later Eugene had gone home with Abe for dinner: he lived with his mother, two brothers, and Jimmy, his sister’s illegitimate child, in a flat which occupied the second floor of an old four- storey red-brick house in Twelfth Street, near Second Avenue, on the East Side. The old woman had prepared a good meal for them: a thick rich soup, chopped chicken livers, chicken, cake, and a strong sweet wine: she served them but would not sit and eat with them: she came in briefly and shook hands shyly and awkwardly, mumbling incoherently a mangled jargon of Yiddish and English. Suddenly, however, as if she had briefly mastered herself by a strong effort, her old and sorrowful face was twisted by a convulsion of powerful and incurable grief, and a long, terrible, savagely wailing cry was torn from her throat: she turned blindly, and with a movement of natural and primitive sorrow, she suddenly seized the edges of her apron in her gnarled and worn hands and flung it up over her head and rushed toward the door at a blind, lunging, reeling step. She was like one demented by sorrow: the old woman began to beat her withered breasts and pull at her wispy grey hair, meanwhile running and stumbling blindly round her kitchen in a horrible and savage dementia and drunkenness of grief. Abe followed her out, and Eugene could hear his voice, low, urgent, and tender, as he spoke to her persuasively in Yiddish, and her long wailing cries subsided and he returned. His face was sad and weary-looking and in a moment he said: “Mama’s breaking up fast. She’s never been able to get over my brother’s death. She thinks about it all the time: she can’t get it off her mind.”
“How long has he been dead, Abe?”
“He died over a year ago,” Abe said. “But that doesn’t matter: I know her—she’ll never forget it now as long as she lives. She’ll always feel the same about it.”
This terrible and savage picture of grief was carved upon Eugene’s memory unforgettably: it became a tremendous and formidable fact, a fact as ancient, timeless, and savage as the earth, a fact which neither the stupefying oblivion of the city’s life, the furious chaos of the streets, nor the savage glare of ten thousand blind and dusty days could touch. The old woman’s grief was taller than their tallest towers, and more enduring than all their steel and stone: it would last for ever when all the city’s bones were dust, and it was like the grief of all the women who had ever beat their breasts and flung their aprons across their heads and run, wailing, with a demented and drunken step: it filled him with horror, anger, a sense of cruelty, disgust, and pity.
She was the fertile and enduring earth from which they sprang, and all of them, transformed so sharply and so curiously by the city’s tone and life, drew in to her with devotion and respect: Abe, with his dreary grey face of the man-swarm cipher; Sylvia, with her feverish, electric night-time glitter; all of the brothers and sisters, with all that was new, sharp, alien, flashy, trivial, or material in speech, dress, manner, and belief—all of them returned to her with love, loyalty, and reverence as to some great brood-hen of the earth. The old woman’s life was rooted in the soil of two devotions: the synagogue and the home, and all that happened beyond the limits of this devotion was phantom and remote: this soil was ageless, placeless, everlasting.
Abe loved his mother dearly: whenever he spoke of her, even casually, his voice was touched with a hush of respect and affection. But he disliked his father: the few times Eugene heard him mention him he spoke of him in a hard and bitter voice, referring to him as “that guy” or “that fellow,” as if he were a stranger. Eugene never saw the father: the children all felt bitterly towards him and had sent him away to live alone. Abe told Eugene that the man was a shoemaker, and apparently improvident and thriftless. He had never been able to earn enough to support his family, and in addition, Abe said, he was a petty family tyrant. Abe’s childhood had been scarred by memories of privation, tyranny and poverty—the mother and the children had had a bitter struggle for existence, and Abe had worked since his eighth year at a variety of hard, grey, shabby and joyless employments: he had been a newsboy, a grocer’s delivery boy, an office boy in a broker’s office, a typist in a collection agency endlessly writing out form letters, the office man and secretary for the head-professor of the architectural school, and one of these pallid, swarthy, greasily sweating youths of the fur and garment house districts who ceaselessly propel through swarming and kaleidoscopic streets of trade small wheel-trucks piled high with dresses, garments, furs, and clothes or with the thousand travelling varieties of all that horrible nondescript junk known under the indecisive name of “novelties.” Once, also, he had spent part of a summer in New Jersey unloading freight cars filled with Georgia water-melons, and for a considerable time he had driven a truck for his two oldest brothers, who had a zinc business in the “gas-house district” of the East Side, between Avenue A and the river and North of Fourteenth Street.
Here, once, Eugene had accompanied him at noon of a flashing day in spring, a glitter of light and flashing waters, a sparkle of gold and blue: in a large bare space near factories they had seen a ring of young thugs throwing dice, and near the river were the immense and ugly turrets of the gas tanks, and then the wharves, the great odorous piers, and the flashing waters—the vast exultant play and traffic of the river life, the powerful little tugs, the ships, and the barges laden with their strings of rusty freight cars.
As they walked away through the powerful ugliness and devastation of that district, with its wasteland rusts and rubbish, its slum- like streets of rickety tenement and shabby brick, its vast raw thrust of tank, glazed glass and factory building, and at length its clean, cold, flashing strength and joy of waters—a district scarred by that horror of unutterable desolation and ugliness and at the same time lifted by a powerful rude exultancy of light and sky and sweep and water, such as is found only in America, and for which there is yet no language—as they walked away along a street, the blue wicked shells of empty bottles began to explode on the pavements all round them: when they looked round to see from what quarter this attack was coming, the street was empty save for a young thug who leaned against the rotting edge of a closed door, hands thrust in pockets, and a look of pustulate and evil innocence upon his thin tough Irish face. The street was evil and silent and empty, but when they turned and went on again, the exploding bottles began to drop around them on the pavement in splinters of sinister blue.
Abe grinned toughly: he did not seem at all surprised or perturbed by the murderous stealth and secrecy of the attack, its obscene and cowardly uselessness. He explained that the district had been one of the worst in the city and the headquarters for one of the most criminal gangs: time and again the gangsters had broken into his brother’s zinc shop and robbed it, and Abe and all his brothers, being Jews, had had to fight it out since childhood, foot and fist and tooth and nail, and club and stone, with the young Irish toughs and gangsters who infested the district. Such had been his childhood: he told Eugene many stories of bloody fights waged back and forth across these pavements, of young boys maimed, crippled, or blinded in these savage fights, of one boy who had his eye torn out of his head by his enemy’s gouging thumb in a fight to a finish on one of the piers, and of another whose brains had been smashed out on the pavement below the elevated structure by a rock hurled by an enemy’s hand in a fight of the neighbourhood gangs. Thus, in pier and alley, on street and roof, children had learned the arts of murder, the smell of blood, the odour of brains upon the pavement. Abe told how one of his older brothers, Barney—a thickly set, powerful-looking man with short thick hands and a tough meaty-looking fighter’s face, grey, square, and good- humoured—had to fight it out step by step with the gangsters, who had come to his shop, again and again, with demands for money— money which the merchants of the district paid them meekly and regularly for “protection”—a euphemism for graft and menace, a bribe for being left alone and for the assurance that one’s shop would not be entered and one’s stock smashed or stolen in the night. Barney had met all these menaces with a hard cold eye and two rock-like fists with which time and again he had beaten into a pulp the thugs who came to threaten him: he was a good man and a savage fighter and he had learned the arts of combat in the sternest and most brutal arena on earth—the city streets.
“And—oh-ho-ho-ho!”—softly, painfully, Abe lifted his widely grinning face and laughed, “how that guy loves it! Say! they picked the wrong one when they picked on him! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho! CAN he fight! DOES he love it! Say! do you know what I saw him do to two of them one time—oh-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho! Gee! it was rich! They came in there to shake him down and—Oh! Ho-hoYou shoulda seen it! He picks up a keg of zinc that weighs 200 pounds and he BREAKS it—oh-ho-ho-ho!—over the first guy’s head.”
