The Mortgaged Heart (18 page)

Harry was small and pale and he always seemed tired. His nose was
large for his peaked face and next to his eyes it was the first thing you noticed. Perhaps that was because he had the habit of slowly rubbing it with his thumb and second finger when he was thinking, gently feeling the hump on it and pressing down the tip. When he was in doubt about a question put to him he would not shrug or shake his head—but slowly turn his slender hands palm upward and suck in his hollow cheeks. Usually a cigarette drooped from his mouth and his thin lips seemed too relaxed to hold it. His dark eyes had a way of staring sharply at a person, then the lids would suddenly droop down as though he understood everything and was still bored. At the same time there was a certain jauntiness about him. His clothes were dapper and he wore a stiff derby hat at an angle on the back of his head. Nothing could ever surprise Harry, but in his own quiet way he could always laugh at everything, even himself. He had come to the town ten years before and he lived alone in a small room on one of the overcrowded streets down by the river. Though he seemed to know half the people in the town by their names and faces he had few friends and was a solitary man.

During the winter after Sara left when Andrew worked at the store every Saturday he liked to watch Harry and think about him. There was a time when he would rather have been noticed and admired by him than any other person. He had never tried to ape his Dad like some boys did. But there was something sure and nonchalant about Harry that seemed wonderful to him. He had lived in cities like Los Angeles and New York and he knew languages and people that were strange to men like his Dad. He wanted to be good friends with Harry but he didn't know how to go about it. When they were together something made him talk loud and hold his face stiff and call grown men by their last names without the Mister. Then he would be embarrassed, stumble over his big feet and get in everybody's way. He felt that Harry saw through all of this and was laughing. This made him mad. There were times when if Minowitz hadn't been so old he would have picked a fight with him and tried to bash his ears in. But although Harry looked like he might be any age he knew that he must be around thirty—and a nearly six foot tall boy of fourteen couldn't fight with a smaller man who was that much older.

Then one morning Harry brought "the dolls" to the store. That was the name somebody gave to the set of chessmen he had worked on for ten years. At first it was a surprise to realize that even Harry could be a crank about something—he had known that he liked chess and owned a fine set of pieces, but that was all. He learned that Harry would go anywhere to find a partner who could give him a good game. And next to playing he liked to just fondle and work with these little doll-like men. They had been carved years ago by a friend of his father—out of ebony and some light hard wood. Some of the pieces had shrunken little Chinese faces and all of the parts were curious and beautiful. For years Harry had worked in his spare time to inlay this set with chased gold.

It was these chessmen that made them friends. When Harry saw how interested he was he began to tell him about the work and also to explain the moves in a chess game. Within a few weeks he learned how to play a fair game for a beginner. And after that he and Harry would play together often on Saturdays in the back of the store. He got so that even at night when he couldn't sleep he would think about chess. He hadn't thought that he could ever like a game so much.

Sometimes Harry would have him up to his place for an evening. The room he lived in was very neat and bare. They would sit silently over a little card table, going through the game without a word. As Harry played his face was as pale and frozen looking as one of his little carved pieces—only his sharp black eyebrows moved and his fingers as he slowly rubbed his nose. The first few times he left as soon as the games were over because he was afraid Harry might get tired of him if he stayed longer and think he was just a boring kid. But before he knew it all that was changed and they would talk sometimes until late at night. There were times when he would feel almost like a drunk man and try to put into words all the things he had kept stored up for a long time. He would talk and talk until he was breathless and his cheeks burned—about the things he wanted to do and see and make
up his mind about. Harry listened with his head cocked to one side and his unsurprised silence made what he wanted to say come faster and even more clearly than he had thought it.

Harry was always quiet, but the things he did mention suggested more than he ever said. He had a younger brother named Baruch who was a pianist studying in New York. The way he would speak of his brother showed that he cared more about him than he did anyone else. Andrew tried to imagine Baruch—and in his mind he was bigger and surer and knew more than any of the kids in his gang. Often when he thought of this boy there was a sad longing feeling because they didn't know each other. Harry had other brothers—one who had a cigarette shop in Cincinnati, and another who was a piano tuner. You could tell he was close to all his family. But this Baruch was his favorite.

Sometimes when he would hurry down the dark streets on the way home he would feel a peculiar quiver of fear inside him. He didn't know why. It was like he had given all he had to a stranger who might cheat him. He wanted to run run run through the dark streets without stopping. Once when this happened he stopped on a corner and leaned against the lamp post and began to try to remember exactly what he had said. A panic came over him because it seemed that the thing he had tried to tell was too naked. He didn't know why this was so. The words jangled in his head and mocked him.

"Don't you ever hate being yourself? I mean like the times when you wake up suddenly and say I am I and you feel smothered. It's like everything you do and think about is at loose ends and nothing fits together. There ought to be a time when you see everything like you're looking through a periscope. A kind of a—colossal periscope where nothing is left out and everything in the world fits in with every other thing. And no matter what happens after that it won't—won't stick out like a sore thumb and make you lose your balance. That's one reason I like chess because it's sort of that way. And music—I mean good music. Most jazz and theme songs in the movies are like something a kid like Mick would draw on a piece of tablet paper—maybe a sort of shaky line all erased and messy. But the other music is sometimes like a great fine design and for a minute it makes you that way too. But about that sort of periscope—there's really no such thing. And maybe that's what everybody wants and they just don't know it. They try one thing after another but that want is never really gone. Never."

And when he had finished talking Harry's face was still pale and frozen, like one of his wizened chess kings. He had nodded his head and that was all. Andrew hated him. But even so he knew that the next week he would go back.

That year he often went out roaming through the town. Not only did he get to know all the streets in the suburb where he lived, and those of the main blocks downtown, and the Negro sections—but he began to be familiar, also, with that part of town called South Highlands. This was the place where the most important business of the town, the three cotton factories, was situated. For a mile up the river there was nothing but these mills and the glutted little streets of shacks where the workers lived. This huge section seemed almost entirely separate from the rest of the town and when Andrew first began to go there he felt almost as though he were a hundred miles from home. Some afternoons he would walk up and down the steep foul sidestreets for hours. He just walked without speaking to anybody with his hands in his pockets, and the more he saw the more there was this feeling that he would have to keep walking on and on through those streets until his mind was settled. He saw things there that scared him in an entirely new way—new, because it was not for himself he was afraid and he couldn't even put the reason into thought. But the fear kept on in him and sometimes it seemed it would almost choke him. Always people sitting on their front steps or standing in doorways would state at him—and most of the faces were a pale yellow and had no expression except that of watching without any special interest. The streets were always full of kids in overalls. Once he saw a boy as old as he was piss on his own front steps when there were girls around. Another time a half grown fellow tried to trip him up and they had to fight. He had never been much of a fighter but in a scrap he always used his fists and butted with his head. But this boy was different. He fought like a cat and scratched and bit and kept snarling under his breath. The funny thing was that the fight was almost over and he felt himself on the ground and being choked when the fellow suddenly got limp like an old sack and in a minute more he gave up. Then when they were on their feet and just looking at each other he, the boy, did a crazy thing. He spat at him and slunk down to the ground and lay there on his back. The spit landed on his shoe and was thick like he had been saving it up a long time. But he looked down at him lying there on the ground and he felt sick and didn't even think about making him fight again. It was a cold day but the boy didn't have on anything but a pair of overalls and his chest was nothing but bones and his stomach stuck way out. He felt sick like he had hit a baby or a girl or somebody that should have been fighting on his side. The hoarse wailing whistles that marked the change in the mill shifts called out to him.

But even after that there was something in him that made him still walk the streets of South Highlands. He was looking for something but he didn't know what it was.

In the Negro sections he felt none of this dim fear. Those parts of the town were a sort of home to him—especially the little street called Sherman's Quarter where Vitalis lived. This street was on the edge of the City Limits and was only a few blocks from his own house. Most of the colored people there did yard work or cooked for white people or took in washing. Behind the Quarter were the long miles of fields and pine woods where he would go on camping trips. As a kid he knew the names of everybody living anywhere near. When he would go camping he used to borrow a certain skinny little hound from an old man at the end of the Quarter and if he brought back a possum or a fish sometimes they would cook it and eat together. He knew the backs of those houses like his own yard—the black washpots, the barrel hoops, the plum bushes, the privies, the old automobile body without wheels that had set for years behind one of the houses. He knew the Quarter on Sunday mornings when the women would comb and plait their children's hair in the sun on the front steps, when the grown girls would walk up and down in their trailing bright silk dresses, and the men would watch and softly whistle blues songs. And after supper time he knew it too. Then the light from the oil lamps would flicker from the houses and throw out long shadows. And there was the smell of smoke and fish and corn. And somebody was always dancing or playing the harp.

But there was one time when the Quarter was strange to him, and that was late at night. Several times on his way home late from hunting or when he was just restless, he had walked through the street at that time. The doors were all closed to the moonlight and the houses looked shrunk and had the look of shanties that have been empty a long time. At the same time there was that silence that never comes to a deserted place—and can only be sensed where there are many people sleeping. But as he would listen to this utter quietness he would always gradually become aware of a sound, and it was this that made the Quarter strange to him in the late night. The sound was never the same and it seemed always to come from a different place. Once it was like a girl laughing—softly laughing on and on. Again it was the low moan of a man in the darkness. The sound was like music except that it had no shape—it made him pause to hear and quiver as would a song. And when he would go home to bed the sound would still be inside him; he would twist in the darkness and his hard brown limbs would chafe each other because he could find no rest.

He never told Harry Minowitz about any of his walks. He could not imagine trying to tell anyone about that sound, least of all Harry, because it was a secret thing.

And he never talked to Harry about Vitalis.

When after school he would go back to the kitchen to Vitalis there were three words he always said. It was like answering
present
at the school roll-call. He would put down his books and stand in the doorway a moment and say: "I'm so hungry." The little sentence never changed and often he would not realize he had even spoken. Sometimes when he had just finished all the food he could eat and was still
sitting there in the chair before the stove, restless but somehow not wanting to leave, he would mechanically mouth those three words. Just watching Vitalis brought them to his mind.

"You eats more than any lanky boy I ever seen," she would say. "What the matter with you? I believe you just eats cause you want to do something and you don't know what else to do."

But she always had food for him. Maybe pot liquor and cornbread or biscuit and syrup. Sometimes she even made candy just for him or cut off a piece of the steak they were going to have for supper.

Watching Vitalis was almost as good as eating and his eyes would follow her around. She was not coal black like some colored girls and her hair was always neatly plaited and shining with oil. Early every morning Sylvester, her boy-friend, walked to work with her and she usually wore a fancy red satin dress and earrings and high heeled green shoes. Then when she got in the house she would take off her shoes and wiggle her toes a while before putting on the bedroom slippers she wore to work in. She always hung her satin dress on the back porch and changed to a gingham one she kept at the house. She had the walk of colored people who have carried baskets of clothes on their heads. Vitalis was good and there wasn't anybody else like her.

Their talks together were warm and idle. What she didn't understand didn't gnaw on her and bother her. Sometimes he would blurt out things to her—and in a way it was like talking to himself. Her answers were always comfortable. They would make him feel like a kid again and he would laugh. One day he told her a little about Harry.