Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York (30 page)

Familiar with the London tubes, the New York subway systems held no terrors for her, but the buses were something else again, and used to London civility, she soon found herself embroiled with one of the occupational neurotics at the helm of one of the north-bound monsters who, trying to make change, operate his money-gobbling gadget, open and close doors, shout out street numbers, and guide his vehicle through the tightly-packed lanes of Yellow Cabs, limousines, and two-toned cars, bawled at her to get to the rear of the bus or get the hell off, he didn’t care which.

‘Is that ’ow it is?’ Mrs Harris snapped at him. ‘You know what would happen to you if you spoke to me like that in
London? You’d find yerself on your bum sitting in the middle of the King’s Road, that’s what you would.’

The bus driver heard a not unfamiliar accent and turned around to look at Mrs Harris. ‘Listen, lady,’ he said, ‘I been over there with the Seebees. All them guys over there gotta do is drive the bus.’

Injustice worked upon people of her own kind always touched Mrs Harris’s sympathy. She patted the driver on the shoulder and said, ‘Lor’ love yer, it ain’t no way to speak to a lydy, but it ain’t human either for you to be doing all that - I’d blow up meself if I had to. We wouldn’t stand for that in London either - trying to make a bloomin’ machine out of a human being.’

The driver stopped his bus, turned around and regarded Mrs Harris with amazement. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘you really think that? I’m sorry I spoke out of turn, but sometimes I just gotta blow my top. Come along, I’ll see that you get a seat.’ He left the wheel, quite oblivious to the fact that he was tying up traffic for twenty blocks behind him, took Mrs Harris by the hand, edged her through the crowded bus and said, ‘OK one of you mugs, get up and give this little lady a seat. She’s from London. Whaddayou want her to do - get a lousy impression of New York?’

There were three volunteers. Mrs Harris sat down and made herself comfortable. ‘Thanks, ducks,’ she grinned as the driver said, ‘OK Ma?’ and went forward to his wheel again. He felt warm inside, like a Boy Scout who had done his good deed for the day. This feeling lasted all of ten blocks.

In a short time Mrs Harris both saw and learned more about New York and New Yorkers and the environs of its five boroughs than most New Yorkers who had spent a lifetime in that city.

There was a George Brown who lived near Fort George in Upper Manhattan not far from the Hudson, and for the first time Mrs Harris came upon the magnificent view of that stately river, with the sheer walls of the Jersey Palisades rising opposite, and through another who dwelt near Spuyten Duyvel she learned something of this astonishing, meandering creek which joined the Hudson and East Rivers and actually and physically made an island of Manhattan.

A visit to another Brown at the exactly opposite end of Manhattan, Bowling Green, introduced her to the Battery, that incredible plaza overwhelmed by the skyscrapers of the financial district, at the end of which the two mighty arms of water - East and North Rivers as the Hudson is there called - merged into the expanse of the Upper Bay with such sea-going traffic of ocean liners, freighters, tugs, ferry boats, yachts, and whatnot afloat as Mrs Harris could not have imagined occupied one body of water. Not even through Limehouse Reach and the Wapping Docks back home was water traffic so thick.

For the first time in her life Mrs Harris felt dwarfed and overpowered. London was a great, grey, sprawling city, larger even than this one, but it did not make one feel so small, so insignificant, and so lost. One could get one’s head up, somehow. Far up in the sky, so high that only an aeroplane could look down upon them, the matchless skyscrapers, each with a flag or a plume of steam or smoke at its peak, filled the eye and the mind to the point of utter bewilderment. What kind of a world was this? Who were these people who had reared these towers? Through the canyons rushed and rumbled the traffic of heavy drays, trucks, and gigantic double lorries with trailers, taxicabs beeped their horns, policemen’s whistles shrilled, the shipping
moaned and hooted - and, in the midst of this stood little Ada Harris of Battersea, alone, not quite undaunted.

In the district surrounding 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, known as Harlem, all the Browns were chocolate coloured, but nonetheless sympathetic to Mrs Harris’s quest. Several of them had been to England with the Army or Air Force and welcomed Mrs Harris as a reminder of a time and place when all men were considered equal under Nazi bombs, and colour was no bar to bravery. One of them, out of sheer nostalgia, insisted upon her having a pink gin with him. None of them had married Pansy Cott.

Via several George Browns who lived in the Brighton district Mrs Harris became acquainted with the eastern boundary of the United States, or rather, at that point, New York - the shore with its long, curving, green combers rolling in to crash upon the beaches of that vast and raucous amusement park - Coney Island.

There the Brown she was tailing that day turned out to be a barker at a girlie sideshow. A tall fellow in a loud silk shirt and straw boater, with piercing eyes that held one transfixed, he stood on a platform outside a booth on which there were rather repulsive oleos of ladies with very little clothing on, and shouted down a précis of the attractions within to the passing throngs.

Mrs Harris’s heart sank at the thought that such a one might be the father of little Henry. Yet in the vulgarity of the amusement park she felt not wholly out of place, for with the cries of the barkers, the snapping of rifles in the shooting gallery, the rushing roar of the thrill rides, and the tinny cacophony of the carousel music it reminded her of Battersea Festival Gardens, or any British funfair, doubled.

Between spiels George Brown, barker, listened to her story with attention and evident sympathy, for when she had
finished he said, ‘It ain’t me, but I’d like to find the bastard and punch him one on the nose. If you ask me, he married the girl and took a powder. I know a lot of guys like that.’

Mrs Harris defended little Henry’s father vigorously, but the barker remained sceptical. He said, ‘Take my advice, ma’am, and don’t trust none of them GIs. I know them.’ Mr Brown had never been in England, but his grandmother had been English and this formed a bond between Mrs Harris and himself. He said, ‘Would you like to come back and meet the girls? They’re as nice a bunch of kids as you could want. I’ll pass you into the show first.’

Mrs Harris spent a pleasant half hour watching Mr Brown’s assortment of ‘kids’ doing bumps, grinds, hulas, and cooch dances, after which she was introduced to them and found, as Brown had said, that they were as described, good-natured, modest about their art, and far cleaner in speech than many of the celebrities who came to the Schreiber parties. She went home after an interesting evening, but no nearer finding the man she sought, though the barker promised to keep an eye out for him.

She learned to like many parts of Brooklyn, where her search took her, for the older and quieter portions of this borough on the other side of the East River, where the brownstone houses stuck against the side of one another, as like peas in a pod for block upon block, sometimes shaded by trees, reminded her somewhat of London far away across the sea.

Since she took the Browns as they came, one George she found was a ships’ chandler who lived over his shop on the waterfront of the Lower East Side. Here again she was an infinitesimal speck in the grand canyons of the downtown skyscrapers, but standing on the cobbled pave by the docks that smelled of tar and spices, she looked up to
the great arches and wondrous spiderweb tracery of the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, across which rumbled electric trains and heavy traffic with such a shattering roar that it seemed to be the voices of those vast spans themselves shouting down to her.

On a visit to the Staten Island George Browns via the Staten Island Ferry, Mrs Harris found one of them to be a tug-boat captain working for the Joseph P. O’Ryan Towing Company, in command of the twin diesel-engined tug
Siobhan O’Ryan
, who was just leaving to go on duty as Mrs Harris arrived.

Captain Brown was a pleasant, brawny man of some forty-odd years, with a pleasant wife half his size, who lived in a cheerful flat in St George not far from the ferry landing. They had once had something in common, for the
Siobhan O’Ryan
had been one of the tugs which had nursed the s.s.
Ville de Paris
into her berth the day of Mrs Harris’s arrival, and the sharp-eyed little char had noted the unusual name painted on the pilot house of the tug, and had remembered it.

Those Browns too were fascinated by the saga of the deserted boy and Mrs Harris’s quest for his father. The upshot was that Captain Brown invited Mrs Harris to come aboard his tug and he would take her for a water-borne ride around Manhattan Island. This she accepted with alacrity, and thereafter was sailed beneath the spans of the great East River bridges, past the glass-walled buildings of the United Nations to look with awe upon the triple span of the Triborongh Bridge, thence over into the Hudson River and down the Jersey side, passing beneath the George Washington Bridge and afforded the view unsurpassed of the cluster of mid-town skyscrapers - a mass of masonry so colossal it struck even Mrs Harris
dumb, except for a whisper, ‘Lor’ lumme, yer carn’t believe it even when you see it!’

This turned out to be one of the red letter days of her stay in America, but of course it was not the right Mr Brown either.

There was a George Brown in Washington Square who painted, another in the garment district of Seventh Avenue who specialised in ‘Ladies Stylish Stouts’, yet another in Yorkville who operated a delicatessen and urged Mrs Harris to try his pickles - free - and one who owned a house in the refined precincts of Gracie Square, an old gentleman who reminded her somewhat of the Marquis, and who, when he had heard her story, invited her in to tea. He was an American gentleman of the old school who had lived in London for many years in his youth, and wished Mrs Harris to tell him what changes had taken place there.

She found Browns who had been airmen in the war, and soldiers, and sailors, and marines, and many of course who had been too young or too old to fill the bill.

Not all were kind and patient with her. Some gave her a brusque New Yorkese brush-off, saying, ‘Whaddaya trying to hand me about being married to some waitress in England? Get lost, willya? I got a wife and t’ree kids. Get outta here before you get me in trouble.’

Not all who had been to London were enamoured of that city, and learning that Mrs Harris came from there said that if they never saw that dump again it would be too soon.

She interviewed Browns who were plumbers, carpenters, electricians, taxi drivers, lawyers, actors, radio repairmen, laundrymen, stock-brokers, rich men, middle-class men, labouring men, for she had added the City Directory to her telephone list. She rang the door bells in every type and kind of home in every metropolitan neighbourhood,
introducing herself with, ‘I hope I ain’t disturbin’ you. My name’s ’Arris - Ada ’Arris - I’m from London. I was looking for a Mr George Brown who was in the American Air Force over there and married an old friend of mine, a girl by the name of Pansy Cott. You wouldn’t be ’im, would you?’

They never were the one she sought, but in most cases she had to tell the story of the desertion of little Henry, which almost invariably fell upon interested and sympathetic ears, due as much to her personality as anything else, so that when she departed she had the feeling of leaving another friend behind her, and people who begged to be kept in touch.

Few native New Yorkers ever penetrated so deeply into their city as did Mrs Harris, who ranged from the homes of the wealthy on the broad avenues neighbouring Central Park, where there was light and air and the indefinable smell of the rich, to the crooked down-town streets and the slums of the Bowery and Lower East Side.

She discovered those little city states within the city, sections devoted to one nationality - in Yorkville, Little Hungary, the Spanish section, and Little Italy down by Mulberry Street. There was even a George Brown who was a Chinaman and lived on Pell Street in the heart of New York’s Chinatown.

Thus in a month of tireless searching the George Browns of the metropolitan district provided her with a cross-section of the American people, and one which confirmed the impression she had of them from the soldiers they had sent over to England during the war. By and large they were kind, friendly, warm-hearted, generous, and hospitable. They were all so eager to be helpful, and many a George Brown promised to alert all the known others of
his clan in other cities in aid of Mrs Harris’s search. So many of them had an appealing, childlike quality of wanting to be loved. She discovered about them a curious paradox: on their streets they were filled with such hurry and bustle that they had no time for anyone, not even to stop for a stranger inquiring the way - they simply hurried on unseeing, unhearing. Any who did stop turned out to be strangers themselves. But in their homes they were kind, charitable, neighbourly, and bountiful, and particularly generous hosts when they learned that Mrs Harris was a foreigner and British, and it was warming to her to discover that the Americans had never forgotten their admiration for the conduct of the English people during the bombing of London.

But there was yet something further that this involuntary exploration of New York did for Mrs Harris. Once she lost her awe of the great heights of the buildings to which she was frequently whisked sickeningly by express elevators that leapt thirty floors before the first stop, as well as the dark, roaring canyons they created of the streets, something of the extraordinary power and grandeur, and in particular the youth of this great city, and the myriad opportunities it granted its citizens to flourish and grow wealthy, impressed itself upon her.

This and her glimpses of other cities made her glad that she had brought little Henry to his country. In him, in his independence of spirit, his cleverness, resourcefulness, and determination, she saw the qualities of youth-not-to-be-denied visible on all sides about her in the great metropolis. For herself it was indeed all too much as scene piled upon scene - Mid-town, East Side, West Side, New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester - and experience upon experience with these friendly, overwhelming Americans, but it was not a
life to which she could ever adapt herself. Little Henry, however, would grow into it, and perhaps even make his contribution to it, if he might only be given his chance.