Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (12 page)

“You have asked me that question,” Barbara said, very coolly and distinctly, “only to set a trap for me. Or to give me a kind of test. I refuse to fall into your trap and so you'll have to give me good marks for passing my first test. I am an actress because
I
know it, and I intend to prove it, and I
shall
prove it. I'll prove it, yet, to you. To
you,
I may prove it late or early, but, actually, that's your option—that's for you to decide.”

“That's my girl,” I said. Saul looked slightly stunned, but not displeased. Lola now watched Barbara with something in her enormous, her brilliantly blue and candid eyes, which made them seem hooded, which darkened the blue with what I could only read as patience. I rose. Saul looked up at me.

“And what,” he asked me, “do you consider
your
qualifications to be?”

I said, “I think you're looking at them.” Then I
smiled. “I need another drink. But I'm sure you realize already that I can't be as definite as Miss King because of the great difference in our backgrounds.”

“My,” said Lola, mildly, “you
are
young. But spirit you have.”

“That's how darkies were born,” I said, and walked back to the whiskey bottle.

I was bitter, I was twisted out of shape with rage; and I raged at myself for being enraged. I dropped ice recklessly into my glass, recklessly poured Scotch over the rocks, took too large and swift a swallow, and, trying to bring myself to some reasonable, fixed place, to turn off the motor which was running away with me, I lit a cigarette and turned my back on the company to stare out of the window. I knew that I was being childish, and, in the eyes of the company, perhaps definitely and inexcusably rude; but I could not trust myself, for that moment, to encounter a human eye or respond to a human voice. It did not help, and it could not have, to recognize that I really did not know—assuming that I aspired to walk in the light of clarity and honor—what had triggered this rage. I refused to believe that it could truly have been Saul San-Marquand: how could it have been if it was really true that I held him in such low esteem? But the measure of my esteem had, fatally, to reveal itself in the quantity of my indifference—which quantity was small and shameful indeed. Here I stood at the Manhattan window, seething—to no purpose whatever, which was bad enough: but it was worse to be forced to ask myself, abjectly, now, for my reasons and find that I did not have any. Or, which, really, I think, caused the cup of my humiliation to overflow, to find that I had no reasons which my reason—by which, of course, I also mean that
esteem in which I hoped to earn the right to hold myself—did not immediately and contemptuously reject. I was not—was I?—stupidly and servilely to do the world's dirty work for it and permit its tangled, blind, and merciless reaction to the fact of my color also to become my own. How could I hope for, how could I deserve, my liberation, if I became my own jailer and myself turned the key which locked the mighty doors? But my rage was there, it was there, it pretended to sleep but it never slept, the merest touch of a feather was enough to bring it howling, roaring out. It had no sight, no measure, no precision, and no justice: and it was my master still. I drank my Scotch, I stared at the stars, I watched the park, which, in the darkness, was made shapeless and grandiose, which spoke of peace and space and cooling, healing water—which seemed to speak of possibilities for the bruised, despairing spirit which might remain forever, for me, far away, a dark dream veiled in darkness. A faint breeze struck, but did not cool my Ethiopian brow. Ethiopia's hands: to what god indeed, out of this despairing place, was I to stretch these hands? But I also felt, incorrigible, hoping to be reconciled, and yet unable to accept the terms of any conceivable reconciliation, that any god daring to presume that I would stretch out my hands to him would be struck by these hands with all my puny, despairing power; would be forced to confront, in these, my hands, the monstrous blood-guiltiness of God. No. I had had quite enough of God—more than enough, more than enough, the horror filled my nostrils, I gagged on the blood-drenched name; and yet was forced to see that this horror, precisely, accomplished His reality and undid my unbelief.

I was beginning to apprehend the unutterable dimensions
of the universal trap. I was human, too. And my race was revealed as my pain—my pain—and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed; until my pain became invested with a coherence and an authority which only I, alone, could provide. And this possibility, the possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of life and the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the very tip of my tongue. My pain was the horse that I must learn to ride. I flicked my cigarette out of the window and watched it drop and die. I thought of throwing myself after it. I was no rider and pain was no horse.

I was standing near a piano. A strange girl, with real eyes in a real face, was watching me with a smile. “You've been very far away,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. Somehow, she cheered me; my heart lifted up; we smiled at each other. “Yes. But I'm back now.”

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome!”

I felt like a boy. I wanted to please her. I touched the piano keyboard lightly. “Would you like me to try to play something for you? Would you like that?”

“I'd love that,” she said.

I sat down. She took my glass and set it on top of the piano for me. She leaned there, smiling on me like the sun. I felt free. “I don't play very well,” I said, “and I don't sing very well any more—my voice changed, you know, when I got to be a big boy”—and she threw back her head, like a very young horse in a sun-filled meadow, and laughed, and I laughed—“but I like to try it from time to time. It—helps—to—keep me in touch with myself.”
I stared at her. She nodded. I struck the keys. “I'll try to sing a blues for you,” I said, “and, after that, even if I'm asked to leave, if you've liked it, I won't mind my exile at all.”

“You won't,” she said, “be exiled. And I'm sure you know it.”

“All
right,
” I said. “Well, all
right,
then,” and I jumped into a song which I remembered Caleb singing, which Caleb had loved, and when I reached the lines,
Blues, you're driving me crazy, what am I to do? Blues, you're driving me crazy, what am I to do? I ain't got nobody to tell my troubles to,
” I looked up and found that the entire room had gathered around the piano. I looked into Barbara's face—she was smiling. She was proud of me. I looked at the nice girl, the girl who had said, “Welcome!” She was smiling, too. Then I looked at Saul and I struck the keys again. “What,” I asked Barbara, “do you think of my qualifications now, princess?”

“We are still,” said Lola, “looking at them. And you can't stop now.”

“If I were you,” said Barbara, “I'd just keep on keeping on.”

“Well, then, all
right,
” I said, and I sang some more. We all got drunk. Barbara borrowed some money from Mr. Frank, and also extorted from him an unopened bottle of Scotch. He was too drunk to care—or, rather, too drunk to help himself, for he certainly cared about his money and his liquor. Saul and Lola, and Barbara and I, were the last to leave the party; and Barbara and I had sufficient genuine elegance and enough borrowed money to drop the San-Marquands, in style, at their stylish Park Avenue apartment. It had been decided that we would work at the Workshop, that summer, in New Jersey, in
effect, as student handymen. Barbara and I were to prepare, for Saul's inspection, one or two improvisations, the nature of which he would dictate, and one or two scenes, which we were to choose ourselves. And, depending on what the summer revealed of our qualifications, we would be accepted into the Workshop. We were very confident and we were very happy. The sky was purple and the sun stood ready, behind this curtain, waiting for her cue, as we reached falling-down Paradise Alley. I had held Barbara in my arms all the way home, and I think that we would surely have slept together that night—or that morning—but Jerry was asleep in Barbara's quarters, and Charlie was snoring in mine. So we woke them up, and opened the whiskey, and told them of our triumphs. And that summer, in fact, for one night, Barbara and I both appeared in
Of Mice and Men.
Barbara played Curley's wife, and I played Crooks.

And now, Barbara, as though conjured up by the twilight, as silently as a reverie, entered my hospital room. “Hi, my love,” she said, and came to the bed and kissed me. “How nice to have you back.”

“It was worth the journey,” I said, “just to have you say that.”

She looked at me. “I trust,” she said, “that one day soon you'll find less drastic ways of being reassured.” Then she smiled. “But I haven't come to lecture you. Dr. Evin has promised to take over that department from me. He's a very nice man, don't you think?”

“Very nice. Have you told him a lot about me?”

“No more than I had to. And
much
less than I know.” I laughed. She walked to the window and touched my flowers. “I hope the nurse knows that these must be taken
out of here at night. She doesn't seem to know much, I must say. Would you like me to read some of your telegrams to you? These silent messengers seem to be merely piling up dust over here. I must speak to that nurse.”

“Leave her alone. She's a nice kid.”

“She is far too easily dazzled by fame. She looks on me as a combination of Queen Victoria and Madame X. And the good Lord knows
what
delicious nightmares
you
are evoking in those covered-wagon breasts. So naturally she can't do her work properly.” She picked up the telegrams and came back to the bed.

Time had not done much for Barbara's figure, though she no longer, as one of her directors had put it, promised only a bony ride. Time had thinned her face and dimmed its color; the theater had put her hair through so many changes that the color which it had now adopted—due to the demands of her present role—was probably as close to the original as she would ever again be able to get; and, though there were no silver locks in it yet, there were, perceptibly, silver strands. Her elegance was swinging and it was also archaic; perhaps elegance is always archaic. She was rather splendidly dressed, in something dark, with a dull, heavy brooch at the neck; her hair was piled very tightly up, in the fashion in which she wore it in the play. She caused one to think, I don't know why, of sorrow and fragility: she caused one to think of time. Her splendor seemed extorted, ruthlessly, from time, and she wore her splendor in that knowledge, and with that respect, and also with that scarcely perceptible trembling. One wondered how such a fragility bore such a ruthless weight. This wonder contributed to her force as an actress. Barbara had become a very good actress—one of the best on a scene which she knew, however,
to be barren. Since she knew the scene to be barren, she was not much impressed by her eminence. She tried to work with as little show, and, she hoped, to as decent an effect, as any honorable cook or carpenter—though she knew very well that there were not many of these left, either. This lonely effort had stripped her of her affectations. Of course, on the other hand, the authority with which this effort had invested her caused many to insist that her affectations had all been disastrously confirmed, and constituted, furthermore, her entire dramatic arsenal. Barbara went on her swinging way. She seemed to listen to life as though life were the most cunning and charming of confidence men: knowing perfectly well that she was being conned, she, nevertheless, again and again, gave the man the money for the Brooklyn Bridge. She never gained possession of the bridge, of course, but she certainly learned how to laugh. And the tiny lines in her face had been produced as much by laughter as by loss. If life had endlessly cheated her, she had resolved not only never to complain, but to take life's performance as an object lesson and never to cheat on life.

“How's the show going?”

“Oh, the show's okay. Your understudy is still going through his all-white-men-to-the-sword-and-all-white-women-to-my-bed bullshit—but—oh, well, you
can
hear him across the Hudson River and he doesn't bump into the furniture. Anymore. He's the only person who doesn't miss you. Naturally.” She opened one telegram. “Do you know anybody named Joan Nelson?”

“No.”

“Well, she knows you and she wants you to get well.” She opened another telegram. “So does someone named Bradley Timkins. Do you know
him?
”

“No.”

“You impress me as being a somewhat solitary type. Not that it's any wonder, as heartless as you are.” She opened another. “Oh. This is from Marlon—you
do
know him?”

“Oh, yes. The friend of my youth.”

“I think that he really
does
want you to get well. He wants
everyone
to get well.”

“So do I.”

“Yes. Well, we haven't got a prayer, sweetheart.”

“How goes the nation?”

“The nation goes abominably. And it's no subject for a sick man to discuss—or a well one, either.” She smiled. “Oh. Here's one from Lola. Show business!”

“Christopher sent the basket of fruit,” I said.

She looked up. The light in the room seemed to change; or, a more tremendous light than the twilight entered it. Perhaps it was Barbara's face at that moment which finally reconciled me to life. “Did he? Oh, let me see.” And I handed her Christopher's telegram. She read it and she laughed. “Oh. That black mother. He'll never change. Christopher.” And then she was far from me. I watched her face. Although I knew her face so well, I did not know it now at all. It was incredibly trusting and triumphant; it existed in another realm, which spoke another language; there is truly something frightening in a woman's face. And yet—how can I say it?—the mystery that I saw there contained a help for me, and promised me my health. “Dear Christopher.” Then she looked down at me. “Leo, I think we have done something very rare.” She smiled. But I cannot describe that smile. It was neither sorrowful nor joyful, neither was it both: it spoke of journeys. I cannot describe it because I could not read
it. Then she spoke, very carefully, testing, as it were, each word. “I think we have managed to redeem something. I think it's our love that we redeemed. Who could have guessed such a thing? Black Christopher!” She walked back to my flowers. “And I was afraid it was too late—that it had all been for nothing—that we'd betrayed and discarded all the best of us—for—what anyone with five dollars can buy at the box office.” She laughed and turned and looked at me again. “Well. Thank you, Leo. We made it one time.”