The Street Sweeper (41 page)

*

A man and a woman were about to meet casually, but by arrangement, for coffee. It was with a sense of foreboding that Adam could see Michelle approaching on Amsterdam Avenue. He feared that she might give him news of some kind about Diana that would underscore just how much he had let her down. The pain from expected news of how Diana was faring in her life after they parted had rendered him almost physically incapable of making this arrangement, even after Michelle had left a message on his answering machine requesting it, and it was his procrastination that shamed him as they approached each other, coming closer and closer until he saw her smile. It wasn’t her best smile but it was better than most anyone else’s.

When she hugged him outside the Hungarian Pastry Shop he remembered what a good friend she had always been and thought for the first time ever that perhaps in some way he loved her. That she was strikingly attractive wasn’t news to him but to know it intellectually is not the same as to register it viscerally. She was his friend and also the wife of his friend but still her beauty hit him like a gust of wind by which no man could remain unmoved. When she hugged him he felt a certain pride he was sure he hadn’t earned or, at least, not recently. They were both tired. Adam saw her tiredness in her smiling eyes and realised how good of her it was to nudge him into this casual meeting for coffee, this exchange.

That’s what this was – an exchange, an exchange of information. There was certain updated information about Diana that the maintenance of his self-flagellation required. Not long after the exchange of niceties they got right down to it. Michelle had seen Diana. That was good. She had visited her in Hell’s Kitchen, Diana’s new neighbourhood. How was she? For the first two weeks Diana had barely eaten anything, almost nothing at all. She had lost a lot of weight and grown weak. She had forced herself to go to work. But she hadn’t gone out to buy food, hadn’t even wanted to explore the neighbourhood. She’d felt numb, briefly angry, but mainly numb. She’d told Michelle that she’d heard about this sort of thing happening to other couples but she had never imagined it would happen to her and Adam. But somehow, after about two weeks, as if it were a virus that she had defeated, she began to be able to think, at least
tentatively, about the future. She started calling people, exploring the stores in the area, and taking advantage of her new location to see some shows.

‘Did you see her apartment?’

‘No, we met at a café on Ninth Avenue.’

Adam tried to picture the area but he didn’t know it very well. ‘Ninth Avenue; what’s around there?’

‘Oh, there’s a lot going on there, ‘round the high 30s, 40s and 50s.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure, a lot of restaurants and bars.’

Adam sat there trying to process it all. Diana had almost starved for two weeks after which she was calling people, going to shows, eating out and hanging out at Ninth Avenue bars. Starving herself was excessive grief. It suggested depression. Two weeks wasn’t very long.

What exactly had he wanted Michelle to say? If Diana was suffering it would hurt him, if she was coping it would hurt him. What he really wanted, although he wasn’t fully aware of it, was for Michelle to somehow convince him that he and Diana should be together again and then to arrange it. Nor was he aware of both just how unrealistic it was to expect this from Michelle and of how this was the only thing she could have said with respect to Diana that would
not
have hurt him.

Adam thought about Diana on her own in an apartment he didn’t know, he thought of her looking gaunt, he thought of Ninth Avenue, he thought about how many hours were contained in two weeks as opposed to the number of hours that were contained in almost ten years. Michelle had wanted to know how he was faring but she had felt he couldn’t have been coping too badly because her husband and her father-in-law had mentioned some new project that seemed to have him inspired and kept taking him to Chicago. She didn’t seem to want to know why he’d ended the relationship. Presumably she’d heard some version of it from Diana. She hadn’t wanted to talk him out of it or to pass on any messages. She’d simply wanted to give him this limited information. Had there been anything she’d wanted from him, from Adam?

A beautiful woman, the wife of the Chairman of History at Columbia, a man who even Adam had observed, no longer had time for anything
that didn’t involve more than one person at a time, is sharing a coffee with a mutual friend. She is smiling through tired eyes and pleading for someone to talk to. But the pleading is there only in her eyes. It remains unsaid.

‘Adam,’ Michelle said after providing the latest news on Diana, ‘when Sonia came over to your place that day, uninvited, and we came to pick her up –’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What did she say?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did she say anything … about Charles and me?’

*

The white men had introduced themselves at the doorway to the apartment at the Mecca and although James Pearson had known they were looking for him and that they had tried to talk to him before, he hadn’t expected them to suddenly arrive at the doorway of his home one hot summer night. Since he knew who they were and knew that they weren’t going to give up, he agreed to go to a nearby bar with them.

‘I’m real sorry to drag you out of your home, Mr Pearson, but as you can imagine, we couldn’t exactly have had this conversation with you at the plant,’ Herbert Marks said, skilfully placing three glasses of beer on the table of the bar. It was a local bar and Herbert Marks and his older colleague, Ralph Hellerstein, were the only white men there.

‘You got me out this late to talk about business. I was fixin’ to go to sleep. Nothin’ against nobody, Mr Hellerstein –’

‘It’s Ralph.’

‘I ain’t lookin’ for no trouble … Ralph.’

‘Can I call you James?’ the younger man, Herbert Marks, asked.

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘There’s already trouble, James.’

‘Now, I admit things can be … difficult at times,’ James Pearson said. ‘But we already got a union, independent union.’

‘James, that’s not an independent union, that’s a company union.’

‘It’s a union … we got a union.’

‘You got grievance procedures that are going to take care of you … every last one of you?’

‘I guess.’

‘Every last one? You think the company union really takes care of the workers? Does it take care of the Negro workers?’

‘No more ‘n no less than anyone else do,’ James Pearson said, sipping on his beer.

Herbert Marks leaned in close. ‘You work with Billy Moore, don’t you?’

‘Yeah … so?’

‘You like him?’

‘Sure I do.’

‘Not a bad splitter, is he?’

‘He one hell of a splitter. Everybody knows.’

‘Slowed down a bit lately though,’ said Ralph Hellerstein almost to himself.

‘He’s a friend of yours, you said? Ever meet any of his kids?’

‘No, I only ever see him at the plant but –’

‘Not
one
of his kids? ‘Cause he’s got five kids. He’s slowed down a little. You know it and you know why.’

‘I don’t know what you talkin’ about.’

‘It’s his back, James,’ said Herbert Marks. ‘He’s got a problem with his back. Sounds like a lower disk problem but, hey, I’m no doctor. He doesn’t want anyone to know but he’s confided in you.’

‘I ain’t sayin’ … I don’t know what you talkin’ about.’

‘James,
we
know about it ‘cause the company knows about it and they know about it because his numbers have dropped.’

‘Billy Moore, he’s a master splitter,’ James said quietly.

‘He suffers back spasms. The company’s noticed he’s slowed down. He’s slowing down the whole line. You’ve tried to cover for him but he’s slowed down.’

‘Not much,’ James countered.

‘No, not so much. Enough so they noticed. Some time in the next week –’

‘We don’t know exactly when,’ Ralph Hellerstein interrupted.

‘Some time in the next week they’re going to send him to see the company doctor. He won’t have a choice, James, he’ll have to go.’

‘Now the doctor’s going to give Billy a series of tests, physical tests, and Billy’s not going to make it. They’re goin’ to keep testing his back until it spasms.’

‘And then?’ James Pearson asked.

‘Then they’re going to fire him.’

‘But he can still work. Might of slowed some but … I mean I know the man. He’s right next to me every day.’

‘Well, he won’t be soon,’ Herb Marks said.

‘He’s got five children, James, worked there eleven years and they’re going to ease him on out the door with nothing in his hand after the handshake leaves him cold with his arm stuck out and his palm facin’ up. They give you that handshake and you’re ready to beg.’

‘But he can still work,’ James protested.

‘James, if the hogs could process
you
do you think they wouldn’t round
them
up, pay
them
what they’re paying you? They’d corral them, spy on them …’ Ralph Hellerstein trailed off and Herb Marks took off.

‘They’d even kid those hogs into thinking they had an independent union. The only reason they don’t do that is that they can’t think of any way to make money out of getting people to eat you.’

‘James,’ Ralph Hellerstein began, ‘they hire and fire as they wish; they pay as little as they can get away with.’

‘Mr Hellerstein –’

‘Ralph.’

‘Ralph, there ain’t nothin’ we can do about any ‘o this.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘We … I don’t know; the workin’ man, the workin’ black man.’

‘Well, see, if you meant “we”, the men on the floor,
all
the men on the floor, I’d say that’s where you’re wrong.’

‘That what you want,
all
the men on the floor?’ asked James Pearson.

‘We want you to consider, now just to
consider
, no undertakings, just to think about joining the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee.’

‘What!’

‘We’re not asking you for an answer now. We’re not asking you to join tonight. We’re asking you to consider joining. We’re going to come back and talk to you about this another time after you’ve given it some thought. Please just think it over. We need someone like you. A lot of people do. In the meantime, if you want to talk to us, you call this number.’

James Pearson looked at the card and put it in his pocket. ‘Mr Hellerstein –’

‘Ralph.’

‘I like to get me my sleep at night. No offence but how do I know when you comin’ back?’

‘When Billy Moore tells you they’re done with him and that he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do, doesn’t know how he’s gonna feed his kids; very soon after that you can expect to hear from us.’

*

Ten miles away Elly Border thought she knew the sounds of her house very well. She had lived there alone with only her father and he was a quiet man. The noises around her home weren’t something she had given conscious attention to. It was rather that they were the dots in a pointillist aural landscape that had been etched into her unconscious. This was different; something was going on outside. It was louder than any cat or any wind could have made and there had been no wind to speak of all that night. She couldn’t avoid the feeling that the something that was out there was a person. What was he doing around her house? Maybe he was drunk.

‘Callie,’ she whispered as she knocked on Callie’s door.

‘Elly, go back to bed.’

It took a few more attempts. ‘Callie! Callie!’

‘You sure better hope you sick or somethin’, young lady,’ she said, opening her door and putting on a bathrobe.

‘There’s someone here.’

‘No, there’s not. Go back to bed. I’m not jokin’ with you, child. You gettin’ me mad.’

‘Callie, I’m serious. Listen!’

But now Callie heard something too. She went downstairs and Elise followed her. Whatever the source of the sound, it was hovering around the front porch. Through the frosted glass at the front door Callie could see a figure right outside. She went to the broom closet not saying a word and, with Elly close behind, she picked up a broom and took it out. She switched on the outside light and could see the shape of a human figure unambiguously. Holding the broom she called to the person, ‘What do you want?’

No spoken answer came, only a little knock at the front door, almost timid.

‘Who is it? What do you want?’ Again no answer came from the other side of the door, nothing but a knock.

Elly stood right behind her at the front door and for the first time she doubted the wisdom of her protector as in horror she watched Callie, broom in one hand, slowly open the door. Elly had been right. She really had heard noises that hadn’t belonged at her home. They had come from a human. Now standing behind Callie, Elly Border saw who it was that had made those sounds. She saw a black man with a crazed look in his eyes. She was terrified. Callie Ford, standing in front of her, saw something quite different. She saw her fourteen-year-old son, Russell. He was terrified.

‘Momma,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘They taken away Mr Pearson. Two white men took him away. I saw it.’

*

It was unusually good luck for Henry Border that almost immediately upon entry to the Stuttgart West DP camp the first person he came across was a DP named Gruenberg who seemed to be some kind of camp elder, a spokesman or communal leader of some kind of the Jewish inmates. This man knew the camp and understood the way things worked there.

‘What is this?’ Gruenberg asked Henry Border, pointing at the heavy recording equipment the older man lugged with him. When Border
explained that he was there to record the experiences of the Jewish DPs, Gruenberg nodded encouragingly.

‘You can record people on this? How does it work?’ he asked but before Border had a chance to reply, a young man walking so briskly he was almost running interrupted them. ‘Very soon, Mr Gruenberg, very soon. I think it will be today.’

‘You come and get me as soon as you think she’s ready. You won’t forget, Shmuel?’ Gruenberg answered.

‘I won’t forget, Mr Gruenberg.’

‘Promise me?’