Strivers Row (15 page)

It was actually another, more practical visitation he had received that day, Jonah knew now. The realization of what it took to be a working minister. Doing things for other people, for
his
people. Giving them strength, telling them their duty—propping them up, if need be. That was what he had held on to, even when his faith had faded after a few, luminous days. To be recaptured only years later, in the depths of his despair after the college upstate—

And yet what had it availed him?
There was no need for his own services, here in his father's church. No calls in the middle of the night—even if he was the one who actually believed.
The founding myth was lost. Buried alive in the back of the church—

Jonah walked back to the vestry, down the hall filled with photographs that had been up since he was a boy, too; now beginning to brown and fade around the edges. All the social organizations his father had been a member of, representing the elite of Harlem society. Rows and rows of preachers and real estate agents, cooks and undertakers, in boiled shirts and tails, lined up in overstuffed, Victorian drawing rooms. Surrounded by ferns and thick velvet drapes, their faces solemn to the point of melancholy. The Boulé and the Alpha Bowling Club. The Comus, and the Society of the Sons of New York, open only to gentlemen who had been born in New York and constituted “the cream of colored society.”

How his father had busted a gut laughing over that one.
“The cream of colored society!”
Sometimes he would just start repeating it, keep laughing until he ended up in a coughing fit on the floor
—

He went up to his father's old office door and paused just outside, listening.
There it was.
The heavy, raspy breathing that seemed to reverberate throughout the church.
His church
—

He knocked then, and entered the little apartment kitchen. Greeting the elder and the church mother who were on duty, Brother Spottswood and his wife. Someone always there, twenty-four hours a day, a woman and a man, in case they were called upon to deal with anything indelicate. He knew his father was embarrassed and a little irritated by so much attention, and he had tried to get the deacons to let him hire a visiting nurse instead, but they wouldn't hear of such a thing. No doubt mortified by the thought of how it would look to the other churches if their founder were to die alone and unattended in his own sanctuary.

The Spottswoods gushed over Jonah, asking about his vacation. Treating him with the same deference that all the congregation did, forcing him to smile, and lie for a few more minutes, then slipping discreetly away. He waited for a moment, collecting himself, then he cleared his throat loudly and walked on into the same room where he had first thought that he had found Christ.

His father was sitting behind the rolltop desk, dark and still and vast. His great girth swaddled in his black, priestlike shirt and white collar. He was slouched down so that the top of his massive bald head tilted toward Jonah—leaning forward at such an angle that his son might have thought he was dead, save for the deep, laborious breathing that now filled the entire room.

His old office was almost barren now. The broken-springed couch gone, along with most of the chairs. All that remained was the desk, and a metal-frame cot and some of his books, lying in careless piles around the floor. His sole concession to the heat a rickety metal fan that Jonah realized to his embarrassment might have been making the noise he had thought he heard coming from his father's lungs. Only these things were left—and the yellowing skull he kept on the very top of his desk, which had always fascinated Jonah as a child, the one his father had retrieved from Cold Harbor, and which may or may not have belonged to his own father.

Jonah had no idea what he did all day at the desk. He didn't write anything, at least not anything that Jonah saw; seemed barely able to hold a book in his hands. Yet there he was, every day when Jonah came to see him.

“Hello, Father,” he said formally, but went forward to kiss him on the top of his bald, rutted head.

His father had been almost beautiful when he was a boy. Jonah had seen him in the ancient mottled daguerreotype that was one of the church's most treasured icons. It sat on his own desk, back on Strivers Row, now—the old man's solitary gift two Christmases ago, wrapped in simple brown butcher's paper and tied with string. He had mutely handed it to Jonah when he had come to see him that Christmas Eve, not three weeks after the war had begun. A family portrait from nearly a hundred years ago, the images in the daguerreotype seeming to shimmer and shift continuously after so much time.

There he was, his father, the oldest child, staring into the camera with boyish sincerity. His brothers and sisters—all gone now— standing or sitting around him. Milton's father—Jonah's
grandfather
— proud and forbidding, scowling back from the studio chair and the hidden photographer's stand that held his head rigidly in place.

And there
she
was, the white woman, standing beside her husband. His grandmother's face, faded away almost into nothingness when the daguerreotypist had overexposed the plate in order to capture all those shades of color in black and white. Nearly all that remained was her eyes and the thin, cryptic line of her mouth.

Now, with his hair gone, Jonah could see all the marks of his father's ninety-four years. The old scars on his face, the terrible, deep grooves on his head from where the mob had attacked him and his mother—the same white woman—during the Draft Riots eighty years before.
They beat her with a wagon rim,
his father had said, marveling at it still when he told him the story.
They beat her with the iron rim of a wagon wheel!

He barely said anything, anymore. He had been nearly silent for over two years now, whether because of a stroke or simply his age, Jonah didn't know. He seemed able to understand things and to move about but he rarely spoke, and then only with the greatest effort. Jonah's talks with him were always one-sided, but still he approached them gingerly. Afraid that his father might want to know something more about Sophia—where she was, what she was doing. Afraid that he might want to know what he was doing.

“We're back from Adam Powell's,” he informed the old man now, sitting down across from him on the unbending metal cot.

“Hmm?” his father grunted. “He wants your endorsement for Congress. That's what it was all about, that's why we were invited,” Jonah told him, his voice more sardonic than he had intended it to be.

“He asked after your health.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

His father nodded, making small, diffident noises, chewing meditatively on one side of his lip.

“How're you making out?” Jonah asked him, a wave of solicitousness suddenly washing over him for the old man, sweeping away all of his self-pity for the moment.
He was so old, had lived through so much.
Two wives buried. Living here in the back of the church at his own insistence. Sitting at that desk every day, almost as if he were waiting for something.
For what?

Jonah got up and walked over to him, standing above him again and stroking the head that he had loved to touch as a child, wondering over the long ruts, and the story of how they had come to be there.
The things we have to tell our children.
Wagon rims for wagon ruts—until he was six he had it in his head that somehow his father's head had been run over by a wagon.
The white woman. Beaten to death in the street, to save his life—

“They treating you all right? Is there anything I can get you? You want me to make you some eggs, maybe?”

He had done that sometimes, coming over to visit his father on restless, late-night rambles. He never seemed to sleep, was awake at almost any hour Jonah went over, in his old-man way, always sitting at that desk. Jonah would make him soft-boiled eggs in the little kitchen, then sit there and watch him eat, slowly sopping up the egg with a piece of toast. It was one of the old man's greatest regrets, he suspected, that he could no longer eat the way he loved. Savoring the codfish cakes Jonah's mother had made him, tossed over and over again in the air to make them light. The crocks of baked beans, cooked all night on the back of the stove, with great, fatty chunks of salt pork, and black molasses on top—

But now he only shook his head, still chewing contemplatively on his lip. Jonah started to back out of the room—

“All right, then—”

—but as he did his father grabbed him tightly around the wrist with one hand, his grip surprisingly sure and firm. Holding him there while he looked up at his son with his large, commanding eyes. Jonah had wavered, inclined at first to gently pry his father's fingers from his wrist and walk back to his home—fighting down the childish desire to cry that welled up inside him now.

Instead, he had sat back down on the cot and told his father all about Oak Bluffs. He had told him everything—about Adam, about Isabel and Hycie, even about crazy, one-armed Wingee, the driver. About how strange and beautiful it all was, and how flattered and yet uneasy, and out of place he and Amanda had felt. Telling him everything, in that rambling, confessatory way that always made him feel good afterward, and that he hated, too. Making him feel, as it did, that he was still a boy. Talking to his father after school in this same room, where he was always willing to sit and give Jonah his undivided attention, interrupting only for a word of advice here, a question there.

Or the way he had when Jonah was still new to the ministry. The diaconate and the elders still wary of him and his father not quite gone yet, his presence hovering over him in the pulpit. Smoothing his way, as fathers did—good fathers—until he should get past all the early snares and coils, and earn their trust.

Except that he never had. He never had made it his congregation—his church, his people. But that was another story, and surely not the fault of this massive, kindly old man sitting at his desk. This man who had always been old to him—

He told him everything—or almost everything, stopping at the incident on the train that morning, which was still too raw for him to talk about, even to his father. When he got to the part where they left the island, he had stopped, and kissed his father good-bye. The old man tried to grab his wrist again but this time he was able to disentangle himself, backing out the door—feeling absurd even as he tried to reassure his father.

“Good night, Pops, that's all for tonight—” all the while thinking,
Walk out of the room like a goddamned man.
His father's big, drooping eyes mutely accusing him, sensing with his old preacher's intuition that he hadn't gotten it all out of him yet, even as Jonah finally left and shut the door behind him.

The whole way home, he wondered if maybe he shouldn't leave until the old man had died. Thinking,
It can't be much longer, what would it matter? At least I would spare him seeing that.

But he had put it off so many times before, his leaving. There was always something. An anniversary, Amanda's birthday. Lost-and-Found Day, the church's most important celebration after only Easter and Christmas, and the central day of his father's life. There was always another reason to stay.
If you're going to go, go. Got to be a man about this, at least.

It was dark by the time he started his walk back, the City just now kicking into gear. The streets full of running, laughing sailors and soldiers, radio cars and MP jeeps racing back and forth. Everything wide open now, as it hadn't been for years before the war—all the stores, the movie palaces, the restaurants and dance halls and bars doing a land-office business, their lights glaring through the dimout. The sounds of loud music, laughter, and shouting emanating from every brownstone and tenement. The tense, ominous groups he had noticed before, crouched around their pieces of paper, were gone, at least for the night. Now there were only the silhouettes of young women, standing and smoking in the doorways of darkened department stores as if they were waiting for a bus, which they were not.

They made a carnival, and called it war,
he thought, watching all the frantic activity around him.
They better make sure it lasts forever.

Ahead of him a Thursday girl was switching her hips, strutting provocatively down the block, and it reminded Jonah that he should go see Sophie tomorrow, though the thought gave him a little chill of both anticipation and foreboding. It had been over a month since the last time, even before they went away, but he knew what it would entail. Going down to her apartment in the Village—

“It's him, it's him!”

There was a sudden arc of light. Jonah tripped, and nearly fell in the blinding, white glare—a letter blowing out in some electric bar sign, or a movie bijou. He blinked rapidly, could just make out a small commotion on the next street corner. More people running across the street to join them, laughing and clapping their hands in wonder.

“It's him! He's come back!”

“Been buried in there for ages!”

“Is it really him?”

Jonah hurried toward them, still half blinded, trying to see what the jubilant little crowd was yelling about. In their midst he could at last make out an elderly-looking white man, with a fringe of wild gray hair, and a drooping gray mustache. He was dressed like someone out of the 1890s—wearing, even in this heat, an antique suit with a gated collar, and a broad, flamboyant bow tie.

“It's the old ghosty man hisself !”

Langley Collyer.
His father had first pointed him out to Jonah years ago, hurrying furtively along the street, pulling an old milk crate behind him on the end of a rope.
Look, there goes the great white race!

Langley and his blind brother lived in the ramshackle mansion at the corner of Fifth and 128th Street. The yard full of junk, the neighborhood boys amusing themselves by throwing rocks through its few remaining windows. When he was a boy, Jonah and his friends liked to tell each other ghosty stories about how the Collyers spent all their time tunneling under the streets of Harlem, and how they could emerge anywhere they wanted to, in the basement of anybody's building. Sometimes, on a slow day, a reporter from one of the newspapers might come up and sniff around the old mansion, banging on its rotting marble-and-wood doors, staring up at the broken-out windows now stuffed up with piles of newspaper. Jonah and his friends would gather to watch, jumping up and down with anticipation.