The Third Generation (22 page)

They’d rob a huckster’s wagon in the early dusk and race wildly down the alley with the apples and bananas. William’s foot would catch on some obvious obstruction, an overturned garbage can, a kid’s tricycle, and he’d pitch headlong, sprawling on the bricks. Quick, violent protest would shake Charles loose from reason; with a savage insane gesture he’d throw his own stolen fruit in a blind arc, breaking windows, he didn’t care.

Once they were out in the alley throwing rocks at a garbage can placed against the schoolyard wall. William had got the range and was doing fine. Their mother called Charles and he was gone for a moment. William went forward to grope beside the can for rocks. Charles dashed back, throwing on the run, and didn’t see his brother until the rock was on its way.

“Will!” he screamed in terror.

William looked quickly up, seeing nothing, and the rock struck him in the center of the forehead right between the eyes. Caught in rigidity, hurt surged through Charles like acid in his veins. Then he ran forward. But William had gotten up and was dabbing at the cut with a handkerchief. He heard his younger brother’s gasping breath and laughed it off.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chuck. I wasn’t looking.”

Charles couldn’t take it. After that he quit playing with his brother. And the gap widened.

Charles hated the city high school. He was given entrance examinations and assigned to the second year. The teachers found it hard to comprehend that he’d attended college.

“Now what’s the name of that school you attended in Arkansas?” his home room teacher, Mr. Sawyer, asked.

“Well, they called it a college.”

“Oh.”

He couldn’t say he was Professor Taylor’s son because they didn’t know Professor Taylor either.

And there was something about the students he never liked. They were all so preoccupied with themselves, so quick to ostracize and condescend. They seemed to him so cheap-smart and city-dirty. At first they were distant and unfriendly. He was alone now; alone against them all.

William had entered the state school for the blind and Charles went with him on Saturdays. Unlike the city schools, here Negroes weren’t segregated. Charles wondered if it was because the students couldn’t see.

William enjoyed it. But for Charles, Saturdays became a time of death. There was something unearthly about the blind students moving so cheerfully among the grim, forlorn buildings. He couldn’t meet the teachers’ eyes. A sense of guilt shattered him. He felt so awfully ashamed for having sight. He’d leave his brother at the door and run until he couldn’t breathe.

William studied braille and took lessons on the clarinet and soon was playing in the band. A deep camaraderie existed among the students. Most of them had a wonderful sense of humor. Their errors due to blindness were a constant source of merriment. William was always recounting something funny he’d done, such as entering the girls’ toilet by mistake. In the darkness he couldn’t see at all. He felt around and his hand had encountered hair.

“I said, ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for the urinal.’ Then someone said in a shrill voice, ‘Wrong department.’” He laughed uproariously.

It made the goose flesh crawl on Charles. Finally he asked in a small, strangled voice, “What’d you do?”

“Heck, I just laughed and went across the hall.”

Nights when the band rehearsed, all of them were accompanied by relatives. It was something like a party; they laughed and talked between rehearsals and ate ice cream and cake. Everyone but Charles had fun; he sat apart, self-conscious, fuming with impotent rage, cauterized with guilt…
How could they laugh, goddamn ‘em! How could they?
How could they? his mind protested. Sometimes his brother turned and spoke to him, thinking him nearby, and he’d have to hurry over.

“What’d you say, Will?”

“Oh—nothing much. Where were you?”

“I—I wasn’t listening, is all.”

The other relatives looked at him curiously. Frequently they smiled in his direction. But he held himself rigidly aloof and unapproachable. In all his actions he was braced against the world.

Athletics gave some relief. Across from the high school was a public playground where gangs of city hoodlums collected after school and played a dirty, vicious brutal game which they called football. That became Charles’s outlet. He played out of a deep subconscious compulsion to kill himself. Bareheaded and wearing only a sweater over his shirt, he’d dive headfirst to make a tackle, flying through the air to meet with full impact a pair of pumping feet.

“Nine—nineteen—twenty-nine—shift!” he’d sing, calling the signals, unconsciously calling the death row in lottery, and he’d receive the ball and start heading, high-kneeing and swivel-hipping, toward the violent men, spinning away from one, jumping over another, until they pulled him down. They’d pile on top of him, dig their elbows into his back, slam his face into the rocky ground. He’d get up grinning, teeth chipped, slightly dazed. And for a moment he’d be free of all the hurt and guilt inside of him.

A curious phenomenon took place within his mind that winter. Whole periods of his past became lost to recollection. There was no pattern, no continuity, no rational deletions, as the editing of a text. Fragments of days, whole months, a chain of afternoons were drawn at random, a word would be missing from a sentence which he recalled with startling clarity, the intended meaning now gone. He didn’t remember a single recitation period from all the years of his mother’s teaching in Mississippi. The evening of William’s accident, the afternoon leading up and the nightmare afterwards, were branded on his brain. But from the time he and his father left the hospital to return home, until William, with their mother, boarded the train for St. Louis, was a complete blank. He didn’t remember the girl, Jessie, how she looked, what she said, nor their walk out to the carnival on Cherry Street that night at all. But he remembered the discovery of their love like the lingering poignance of a moving dream, the dream itself having vanished on awakening. And the feeling of the emotion was still so strong within him at nights it made him cry. It was as if a madman had snatched pages from a treasured book, the story stopping eerily in the middle of a sentence, a gaping hole left in the lives of all the characters, the senses groping futilely to fill the missing parts, gone now, senselessly gone, now the meaning all distorted as if coming suddenly and unexpectedly into a street of funny mirrors. In after years it was as if they’d never lived within their house at all; never eaten a meal in the dining room, never sat together in the living room.

But outwardly he was helpful and obedient. He was wonderfully considerate toward his brother. When it became cold enough to freeze the lakes they went sledding in Forest Park. Directly in front of the Art Museum was a long, steep slope adjoining the lake and when the snow was packed the sleds went down at a furious pace and coasted far across the lake.

William loved to sled. Charles sat at the front to steer, William clung behind, and when it came their turn the policeman on duty gave them a mighty push. It seemed as if they soared through the air. William whooped and yelled like an Indian, putting out his face to catch the hard cold push of air. Charles set his teeth and braced his body against disaster. He always felt a sense of trepidation, a fragile, fluttery feeling inside, such as he experienced when looking down from heights. He knew if he saw William hurt just one more time he’d come apart inside.

But Forest Park held their fondest times together. On Sunday afternoons their father came with them. The zoo enthralled them both. William, his head cocked, listened to the scolding of the monkeys.

“You can almost understand them, Chuck.”

Charles was fascinated by the lion’s silent prowling, back and forth, back and forth, his gaze caught in the lambent, hypnotic eyes coming forward toward the bars, the fluid body turning like running water, his gaze released, caught, released, caught, released, endlessly.

They always tried to reach the birdhouse at feeding time. “Listen to the babble of the birds,” William said. It was his great delight.

In the spring they liked to walk across the ordered acres, down the long stone walks between the sentinel trees, coming suddenly up the wildness of a rocky hill. It was away, care was momentarily gone, the people here were all trespassers like themselves. And, too, their father seemed a little happy on Sunday afternoons.

Spring in St. Louis was a haunting time. The barbecue pits in the backyards were fired and the soft warm evenings were pungent with the scent of sizzling pork. Excited childish voices floated through the dusk.

Five…fifteen…twenty-five…

Are you ready?…

Children fled and screamed.

And the morning air smelled of dew and growing things. For that brief period a little bit of country came to the city’s cluttered streets.

Once Charles awakened in the night and felt his brother crying. Sharply he recalled a night a long time before when he’d run off to a fire and had seen a strange lonely lady and was crying for her in the dark; and his brother’s voice, consoling, “Don’t cry, Chuck. Go to sleep, Chuck. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Now he wanted to console his brother as he had been consoled. But he couldn’t find the words. He clenched his teeth and held himself rigid in the dark.

That summer he got a job cleaning and delivering for an old German druggist, and his father bought him a secondhand bicycle. The first morning he swept and mopped the floor and wiped the candy counters. He’d hung his sweater alongside his employer’s, and when the old man wasn’t looking, stole a package of cigarettes, two packages of chewing gum and a chocolate bar and slipped them into its pocket.

At last the druggist sent him on a delivery. On his return the old man thrust his hand into the sweater pocket and dramatically displayed the loot. “You are a thief!” he shouted, his blue eyes dancing beneath the bushy brows. “I should call the police and have you arrested!”

Charles quaked with fright.

“The minute I turn my back you steal this trash.” Furiously the old man shook the loot before his face. “Go! Get out of my sight! Here, take your sweater,” he called as Charles ran off without it. “If I knew how to get in touch with your mother I’d tell her you’re a thief.”

He snatched his sweater and fled. For hours he cycled up and down unfamiliar streets. He was in a daze. He didn’t know why he’d stolen. He didn’t want the things he’d stolen. And he knew the old man would have given him the chewing gum and candy.

It was late that night when he went home. The house was quiet. A single light burned in the living room. His mother was waiting up for him.

“You must be tired, son,” she said. “Why must you work so late?”

“I had to clean up after the store was closed,” he lied.

“But why couldn’t you do it tomorrow morning?”

“I quit, Mother. I told the druggist I wasn’t coming back. He asked me to stay and clean up for him.”

She looked at him searchingly. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Did you get into any trouble, son?”

“No, Mother, I just didn’t like the job.”

“Don’t get into any trouble, son. Mother couldn’t bear it.”

She arose and led him toward the kitchen. “I saved your dinner.”

He watched her as she busied about the stove. She looked so frail and tiny and so old. Gray streaks fell like stripes of sorrow in the long brown tresses he’d loved so passionately to brush. She was like some strange little white woman he’d never seen before. What had she to do with him? He felt trapped in another person’s house, sitting at another’s table, looking at a stranger’s mother. And then she turned with his plate. He met the greenish glint of her deep-set eyes, and saw the tender worry they held for him. Suddenly she was his own beloved mother in an overwhelming flood.

“Mama, Mama.” He groped blindly forward and clasped her about the waist.

She put down the plate and drew him to her breast. “My baby, my baby,” she sang tenderly, the crying note of worry cutting through his heart. “My little baby. What have you done now?”

“Nothing, Mama,” he sobbed. “Nothing. I haven’t done anything, honest. I just love you, Mama. And I hate to see you worry so.”

“Mother loves you also, son. That’s why Mother worries so.”

After a moment he wiped his face and ate his food. He made a vow to himself that he would never steal again.

And three weeks later he was fired from another job for stealing. All that day he’d stolen things to carry home—a camera, a nickel-plated watch, a carton of cigarettes and two quarts of ice cream—and had stored them in an empty barrel in the basement. His employer, Mr. Greenbaum, had been watching him all day. At quitting time he called Charles down and confronted him.

“I didn’t put it there,” Charles denied, frightened sick inside as if he had to vomit. “I didn’t put it there.”

“You seemed like such an honest boy,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Maybe if you’re stopped now you can make something out of yourself.”

“I didn’t put it there. I don’t know who stole it. It wasn’t me.

The ice cream had melted and ruined everything. Mr. Greenbaum sadly shook his head. “The loss. It’s nothing to me, boy. I can afford it. It won’t break me. But the loss to you, son, you can’t afford.”

Charles felt the urge to yield, to confess and beg this kind man’s forgiveness. But to confess would have made him the defeated one. He felt that if he once confessed he’d be forever lost.

“I didn’t take it,” he denied again. “I swear it wasn’t me.

Mr. Greenbaum looked suddenly old and tired. “Come with me, I’ll pay you off,” he said.

He pedaled slowly up the hill of Delmar Boulevard. He’d always liked the name of that street; it had such a pleasant sound. People were entering the theaters along the way. They looked so happy. Everyone was with someone else.

At Vandeventer he saw a hot dog man, the shiny, steaming kettle slung across his back. He stopped and ordered one. The man put the kettle on the pavement, spread sauerkraut between a bun and nestled down the long, black, steaming weiner. Charles sat on his bike and ate it slowly. The man lifted his kettle and went along. The night closed in. Suddenly tears scalded down his cheeks. “Goddammit! Goddammit!” he cried. He’d failed his mother after all. Why couldn’t she take him as he was, he thought. Why was she always forcing him into making some kind of vow he couldn’t keep? Why didn’t she let him alone?