Strivers Row (44 page)

“But you must've been in love before,” she said, her words so faint that he could barely hear them at first.

“What's that now?”

“I said, you must've been in love before.”

“I told you, baby. I never felt like this 'bout anyone before—”

“There must've been
somebody
. White or black, there must've been somebody,” she said, turning to look up at him again. Her hair magnificently tousled in the bedclothes, but her face composed and knowing once more. “I know you too well, you're too kind for there not to have been somebody.”

“No. There never was,” he said shortly, so startled by her compliment that he had to keep himself from choking up.

“Maybe not. Maybe nothing like you feel now,” she conceded, smiling sweetly at him, looking almost embarrassed herself. “But somebody you thought you loved then.”

“No. C'mon!” he shouted, as she thrust her hand out, tickling him, making him twist away from her on the bed before he could wrestle her down again.

“C'mon, baby. Tell me! I'll be nice to you!” she said, out of breath beneath him.

“I know you will,” he said, but he let his hands slip from her wrists, letting her pull him down on her. Afterward, before they fell back asleep, she had tried to make him tell her again, but even Malcolm knew better than to tell one woman about another. That didn't mean, though, that he hadn't thought on her, even as Miranda slept against him, her head resting peacefully in the crook of his arm. Thinking all about Laura, and Boston, and how green and foolish he had been then—as if it had all been a long time ago instead of a few short months.

He had met her up on the Hill, in Roxbury, a place where nothing was just what it seemed. She had walked into Townsend's Drugstore, where his sister had gotten him a job behind the counter, jerking sodas for eighteen dollars a week. He had noticed her at once, looking so beautiful and poised in her neat gray pleated skirts, her modest sweaters. Laura, with her large brown eyes, and her soft voice, and the proud way she held herself, her bearing reminding him of no one in the world so much as his mother.

He had come to Boston in the first place because of Ella, his half-sister, who didn't look at all like his mother. That was what Malcolm had been struck at once, by how much thicker, and darker, and healthier than Louise she was, when she had come to visit them in Michigan. She was a heavyset woman, solid as a bowling ball, always trundling around the house acting as if she was in charge of something, because she was over thirty and had been married. One day, when she was at the stove boiling water, she had even threatened to scald his brother Philbert if he did not obey her. When she actually reached for the pan, Philbert hit her with a right uppercut so quick and hard that it dropped her to her knees—but Malcolm had been impressed by how she quickly got back up, still giving orders.

Ella had talked to him as no one had since Mr. Maynard Allen, or Mrs. Swerlein. She was always going on about how she owned houses in Boston, and was a businesswoman, and that if she could become rich as white folks, they all could do it, on account of their West Indian blood. Most of his brothers and sisters hadn't been able to abide her, working day and night as it was just to keep the house from crumbling around their heads. But Malcolm had listened, and believed; even let her coax out of him his secret desire to be a lawyer—the first and only time he had confided that to anyone besides Mr. Kaminska, back in Mason.

“You gonna be a lawyer, then you be the best lawyer there is,” she had ordered him, in the bellow that was her usual tone of voice. “You could even be president, you set your mind to it!”

The idea that anyone would have such matter-of-fact confidence in what he could be captivated him, much more than the thought of actually becoming a lawyer. He had traveled for two days by Greyhound bus to get to her home on Harrishof Street, arriving rumpled and exhausted, only to have Ella make him stand in the foyer for half an hour while she ripped him apart over his hair and his clothes, and how he spoke and acted.

“I don' wanna catch you makin' time wit' any low-life Negroes from down the Town! I hope you be meetin' some of the nice young people your age, from up here on the
Hill!
”

He had been awed by her house, when he finally got inside it, by the framed pictures on the wall, and whole cabinets full of good china, and glasses. His own room was just a sliver of space under the attic eaves, the roof beams just above his bed. It was freezing in the winter, and suffocating as the spring turned into summer. But it was his own, at least, and Ella was a real Georgia woman in the kitchen, fixing meals of ham hocks and collards, fried fish and sweet potatoes and cornbread that filled even him. And in the weeks and months that followed, he did everything he could to live by her house rules. Even duly confessing, scribbling notes to report on his own transgressions before he went out:

“I broke three cups. I know I'm going to get killed, but I didn't break anything else.”

She talked about the Hill they lived on with a reverence Malcolm had heard other people reserve for God, or their minister. She was always telling him how lucky they were to live among the Four Hundred of Boston colored society—the most cultured and well-bred Negroes in the city, whom he came to understand she was not yet part of, but was set on joining. Each morning she would point out to him the stiff-necked, old-family Negro men who walked by her house on their way to work: “You see him? He's in the law.
He's
in government.
He's
in finance...” Dressed like ambassadors in their pinstriped suits and white collars, a newspaper tucked under one arm, their chins lifted high.

Ella had their wives and daughters over as often as she could for dinners, or even teas, openly courting their acceptance. Malcolm could not deny that each of them was possessed of an immense, undeniable dignity, and for a brief time he had shared in her aspirations. On Sunday mornings he would listen to the slow, stately hymns that issued from the windows of their Unitarian and Congregationalist churches—noting approvingly how little they resembled the shouting and moaning that emanated from his father's old Baptist congregations, or his mother's Seventh Day Church, and he thought that these were Negroes who knew how to behave like human beings.

But before long he had begun to notice the lunch buckets the men carried in their free hands, the rolled-up work clothes carefully hidden under their copies of the Boston
Evening Transcript
. Discovering as he did that not one of them, for all their airs, was anything grander than a janitor at a downtown bank, a messenger for some bond house. That they were an aristocracy of postmen and Pullman porters, shoeshine men and waiters, and live-in cooks who talked at them in the broad-r'ed, Brahmin accents of their employers, insinuating knowingly,
“I'm with an old family.”

Their children spurned him, too. That was still before Malcolm had been transformed, and they laughed at how his arms and ankles protruded, scarecrowlike, from the once beautiful apple green suit; at how country his hair looked, all nappy and ungreased. He was embarrassed all over again, just as he had been back in school in Lansing—sticking his chin right into their Hill-boy faces when they laughed a little too close or too near, making the hardest face he could and demanding,
“What did you say?”

He had to see them every day, once Ella made him take the job jerking sodas at Townsend's. Working there for a nice old couple named Berlant, who were impressed by his attitude and his energy. Taking the orders of sleep-in maids who told him that they lived on Beacon Hill, and serving women in hospital cafeterias who wore cat-fur stoles around their necks, and called themselves dietitians. The high school girls who turned their faces away when he tried to talk to them, or who coaxed him into singing along with Louis Jourdan on the jukebox before they burst into uncontrollable laughter, then ran out the door screeching.

He spent as much time as he could by himself. As he learned to negotiate the subways, and trolleys, he explored more and more of the greater city around them. Gawking at the big white hotels and restaurants downtown. Hanging around North and South Stations where he watched all the people coming and going from their trains, the families reuniting with each other. Other times, when he had no money at all to spend, he would just wander through the Common. Staring at the monument of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment across from the statehouse, the rows of solemn Negro soldiers, marching determinedly forward with guns on their shoulders; their fierce white commander, Colonel Shaw, riding on his horse, high above them.

Then Laura had come in to the drugstore. She was serene and beautiful, a tall girl who looked taller because of the way she held herself. He saw the resemblance to his mother at once, saw how she even had her long eyelashes, and light skin. She didn't sit and giggle with the other Hill girls, but seemed genuinely unaware of anyone or anything around her—diving avidly, rapturously back into the books she always carried with her as soon as she sat down. The first time he had worked up the courage to say anything to her, he hadn't believed he could think of nothing better than her fountain selection. Yet he had said it anyway—trying to keep his voice down so the snickering girls at the other end of the counter couldn't hear him.

“I'm sorry, what did you say?” she asked softly. Those large brown eyes dancing. The subtle slope of her breasts rising gracefully as she leaned toward him over the counter, until he was almost unable to repeat himself.

“I said, you always get a black-an'-white frappe. Why don't you try somethin' different sometime?” he mumbled, smiling stupidly. “Maybe a banana split.”

He thought it was certainly the most foolish thing one human being had ever said to another. But she had laughed and smiled at him, her face guileless and friendly, until he had wanted to lean down and kiss her right there.

“Well, maybe I should let you make me one,” she had allowed, in that same soft, quiet voice, and after that he always began to make a banana split the moment she came through the door.

He found better things to say to her, too. He had discovered that her favorite subject was algebra, and that she wanted to be a scientist, and with much trepidation he had told her in turn that he wanted to be a lawyer. But she had only laughed happily, nodding her head.

“Why not, Malcolm? Why not?”

That much about her was different from his mother. How freely and happily she laughed. Her eyes shining—

She had agreed to go out with him, and they had started taking long walks around the neighborhood together after school— Malcolm delighted to see the other Hill boys staring at them together, though she never seemed to notice. She was his first real girlfriend, and she took his breath away whenever he first saw her, coming into the drugstore, or skipping down the steps of her house while he waited for her. He cut his hair, and tried to dress better for her, and sternly reminded himself before every time he was to meet her not to act foolish, but to behave like a gentleman.

He felt good talking to her, and being around her, but he was afraid of her, too—afraid that he might spoil her, or anger her when he so much as touched her. Approaching her like he did all of Ella's fine things, amazed by her but fearful that his clumsiness would just wreck everything. On Saturday afternoons he took her down to see the double feature at the Loew's State, sitting next to her in the dark, cavernous theater. It was widely known as a perfect petting spot, but the furthest he had ever gone was to put an arm clumsily around her shoulders, or to hold her exquisite, smooth hand for a few minutes, achingly aware of how clammy his own was.

She lived with her grandmother, who insisted that Laura be in by supper. Her face puckered in disapproval whenever she saw Malcolm. She would not even invite him in when he brought Laura home, so he was only able to glimpse a brown, dimly lit parlor from the doorway; the room filled with crucifixes, and pillows embroidered with lines from the Psalms, and pictures of Jesus' suffering white face turned to Heaven. It was just as well by him. He couldn't blame her grandmother, he wanted to protect Laura from everything out there himself, and he rushed to get her home when they were running late.

Nonetheless, they had begun to stray farther from the Hill, and Roxbury, Laura taking him to places he had yet to discover on his own explorations. One afternoon they had ridden the T all the way out to Cambridge, and walked through the Harvard Yard, holding hands. Malcolm staring up at the imposing brick buildings as she pointed them out to him—telling him excitedly at one point, “Look, that's the Harvard School of Law!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Malcolm, there's no reason you can't pick up where you are and become a lawyer, just like your sister says. Maybe right here,” she said, responding to the doubt in his voice, smiling at him with her large, hopeful eyes.

“Yeah, sure. Why not?” he said, and tried to smile at her. Thinking of all it would take for him to become a lawyer, what it would take to please Laura, to live up to what she wanted him to be. He tried to picture them married, he going off to a courtroom every day—gazing down at her pretty, guileless face below him. But before that, he wondered how he could ever do what she expected. Going back to some Hill high school, getting his diploma— dressing and acting like all those kids who came in to taunt him in Townsend's—

And if he failed, becoming—what? Another one of those pretend men Ella watched worshipfully on the way out to work, pretending to be a lawyer, a doctor?

“I'm sure your sister would help you,” Laura continued in her soft, coaxing voice. “She told me she would. She said she would take in laundry, if it meant helping you become a lawyer!”