Strivers Row (61 page)

—and jumping back only when the man kept coming on. His face contorted in fury, that umbrella brandished above his head like a spear, or a cross. Surprising Malcolm so much that he ran, too. Easily outdistancing the preacher up Seventh Avenue, yelling back at him in his bewilderment. Afraid that he might do the preacher bodily harm if he stayed, though he would have liked to ask him what the hell he meant bringing down that awful curse on him, worse than anything his father or his mother ever said to him, combined:

“Damn you for living!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

JONAH

That Monday morning he had walked out of Harlem for the last time. Trying to take careful note of everything around him, for he knew he would not come back here again. Walking the length of both blocks of Strivers Row, up and down, committing to memory each of the exquisite, sand- and rust-colored houses, the slender, gracious trees. Staring for the last time at the gateposts from a forgotten era with their admonishment,
Walk Your Horses!—
even staring down the back alleys, with their garages and servants' rooms, and the neat rows of ashcans.

He made his escape easily enough. The logistics of it had come readily to him, Jonah realizing that he had been thinking about this day for years. He had packed a briefcase with a few of his immediate needs. A couple of clean shirts, enough socks and underwear for a few days. Some more of the ration coupons he had stockpiled from Jakey. A Bible. Doing it all late at night, once he had said goodbye to his father, and Amanda had finally given up waiting for him and gone to sleep. After chasing off that crazy boy who seemed to dog his every footstep, he had walked around aimlessly for hours, deliberately waiting out his own wife. He had set the alarm clock on his bedside table but it hadn't been necessary, he hadn't slept at all. He had been up as soon as the sun came through their bedroom window, showering and shaving with the awful, sulfuric shaving powder he needed to cut through the tough stubble of his beard— dreadful-smelling stuff that she had often teased him about. Dressing as quickly and quietly as he could in the bright early light.

She had still been asleep by the time he was ready to go, just as he had hoped. Lying facedown, sprawled diagonally across the bed-clothes. That had been one of their little jokes together, too, how once she was asleep she would spread out and take up as much of the bed as she could get away with. He leaned over her now, kissing her once along the backs of her supple shoulders, just above the simple cotton shift she was wearing. Letting one hand linger along the marvelous smoothness of her skin, thinking how much he would miss that.

She stirred slightly, muttering something into the pillows, but she did not open her eyes. He lifted his hand immediately and padded quietly toward the door, whispering to her only
Good-bye, baby.
Just as glad that she hadn't gotten up, afraid that he couldn't take a breakfast of lying to her face while she made him bacon and eggs, and squeezed his orange juice for him. Thinking that it was better this way, that he would write her from wherever he was going and try to explain the whole thing. Thinking it was better that she hate him a little, at least right away.

He had flown on down the stairs then, not taking so much as a last look at the immaculate, child-free adjoining parlors. Not even glancing up at the blue eye of God, now pouring through in the skylight. He had opened the beautiful wooden door with its etched glass as he had done thousands of times before, ever since he was a boy— a privileged prince of the church—and trotted on down the stoop and out into the street.
Just like that, leaving the house he had lived in for some twenty years.
His legs quivering beneath him as he walked away but still managing a genteel hello to the few other residents who were awake at this hour, and not away at Oak Bluffs, or Asbury Park. The writer who wrote bitter polemics on race for the
People's Voice,
and merry satires of the colored upper crust he lived amongst for the
Pittsburgh Courier.
The lawyer who was employed by the NAACP's legal-defense fund, still working on his twenty-year strategy to integrate the state university in Texas. The Reverend Earl Ward, a young assistant minister to Adam over at the Abyssinian who was walking his bicycle over to Riverside Park for his vigorous morning ride. A health faddist who was always walking something over there, a bike or even a canoe—giving Jonah an entirely too hardy wave and
Hello!
for this time of the morning.

People they had had at their dinner table. People he had stood with at a hundred cocktail parties and receptions, trying to make small talk. Politely discussing Du Bois and Walter White, and A. Philip Randolph and Franklin Roosevelt. The relative merits of psychoanalysis, and the NAACP, and vigorous bicycle rides. All that trivia, to pass the days.
Were those the sorts of things the Jews had talked about, too? In Warsaw, and Cracow and Lodz, before the war?

Out on Seventh Avenue, it was a beautiful summer's day. The sun was shining brightly, but it was cooler than it had been in weeks. The first, teasing harbinger of fall, the blessed season in the City. Everything looking cleaner and tidier, the rain having chased much of the usual debris off the street, and the mattresses and bedding off the fire escapes.

The angry little knots of people he had seen together on the stoops and the street corners all summer were gone, too, at least for the moment. Everyone sleeping in, or moving around a little more, taking advantage of their temporary respite from the heat. The supers and landladies already wedging open their front doors. Keeping them closed later most mornings, to try and hold in the cooler night air, but throwing them open to the elements now, trying to flush out their heat-fouled apartment houses. The windows above them filled with stars and little American flags, each one denoting a young man off serving his country.

The streets were already cluttered with children not wanting to miss a moment of their summer time off. Playing paddle Hi-Li, or chalking out hopscotch courts. Jonah maneuvered around stickball players, and pig-tailed little girls, obliviously chanting their usual jump-rope ditties—
Oh, I won't go to Macy's anymore-more-more / There's a big, mean policeman at the door-door-door—

When he reached the Fabian toy store on 128th Street, he saw that it was Yo-Yo Day, the monthly visit of the traveling yo-yo salesman. An arc of boys and girls, and not a few adults, stood on the sidewalk out front, watching a silver-haired white man with a splotchy, soft, drinker's face impassively working two yo-yos to a hand. He walked the dog, and went around the world, rocked the cradle and reached for the moon. The brilliantly striped and spiraled wooden circles whirling far out into the air and just over their heads, before being yanked adroitly back in. The kids flinching and oohing and watching solemnly, the grown-ups grinning like kids despite themselves, lowering their heads and laughing in embarrassment.

He walked all the way over to his usual elevated stop on 125th Street, making sure that he saw it all one more time. Making sure to pass the knife grinders coaxing the old nags that towed their wagons down the streets for one more morning, the I-Cash-Clothes men staggering along under their many colored coats, and layers of hats. Past all the fish vendors and the fruit vendors and the greens sellers, the iceman and the ices men, and the rag man and the crab men, singing their jubilant songs to the open windows above—

Got blackberries today, folks!

Blackberries for the baby,

Blackberries for the ol' lady,

Blackberries for the ol' man—

And then the inevitable, teasing pause—

If you ain't got no ol' man, take me!

Sung not with the usual, wry weariness or calculation of the salesman but with real exuberance, as if, for just this once, to be out walking the streets of Harlem for hours trying to sell fish or berries or fifty-pound blocks of ice was reward enough in itself. And Jonah—his briefcase crammed with shirts and underwear, and that Bible—was filled even then with the doubt that he could actually go.

But then he bought a paper, putting down three cents for a
Herald Tribune
with the boy at the bottom of the steep metal staircase leading up to the miniature chalet of the station platform. Scanning the headlines of the usual daily affronts—
whites walking off the job because a handful of colored workers were promoted to machine jobs at a naval arsenal in New York, or an engine-parts plant in Indiana; hired to run streetcars in Philadelphia; to work in a defense plant in Newark
— but skipping over them for the most part.

He turned instead to the accounts of the riot in Detroit, the pictures of colored men lying dead and wounded in the street. There they were, sure enough, just as he had heard on the radio.
It wasn't a hallucination.
There were the men being pulled off a streetcar, in a northern city, by whites gripping lengths of lead pipe, and beer bottles by the neck. Lined up against a wall by the police. Hands folded behind their heads, like prisoners of war—or like men being lined up for a firing squad.

Just like in Poland—

The rickety little, elevated train finally arrived, and Jonah stepped on. Thinking as he did that this was the last contact he would ever have with Harlem—his feet technically off the ground already. Not having bothered to wear his clerical collar this time, just his best light blue summer suit; the same hue as the eye of God in the skylight. Not hiding anything. Welcoming the idea that some member of his congregation might see him—some church mother able to tell her story to the police, and over and over again to her friends at her beauty parlor, or in her mah-jongg club—
“I seen him that morning. That must've been him, settin' off as easy as you please! He even nodded, an' smiled at me!”

But as it actually happened, no one he knew stepped on board, and Jonah took the train to his usual, midtown stop. Descending the long metal stairs again, down into that cool, dappled middle world where he shucked his old self, the world of whirring pigeons and gloomy bars, and novelty shops. One more stop among the old, oblivious white men among their newspapers. One more time, checking on his reflection in the cigar case. Staring back at himself . . .
a white man?

He cut east, heading for the obvious place to spend the first, few nights of his new existence. Someplace not too far from his gloomy midtown world under the elevated, but a world away. The Roanoke Hotel—what would be the site of his last, secret triumph.
And what will you do for fun now?
he could picture Sophie sneering at him.
Drop in on the colored folks for a change of pace?

He strode right into the lush, carpeted lobby of the hotel. Not worrying in the least that he would be spotted now, only afraid that it might be full up with the usual, wartime crush of salesmen and dealmakers, politicians and brass. But he was in luck, there was a room open, No. 1555. He took it at once, trying not to look too eager, paying with cash in advance. Upstairs, he sat on a bone-white bedspread, the briefcase balanced on his knees, after the bellman closed the door with a conniving smile. Wondering why it was he had come back to this place. Knowing only that he had conceived of it as a halfway point, some neutral, secret place from which he could move after a couple of days, into his new life.

And now, here he was, upstairs sitting on this white bedspread, in a white room. He stood up, and paced around the room, trying to keep his mind on the practicalities. A day or two here at the Roanoke, while he got his bearings, and decided just where he was headed.
California,
he thought. That was where he had always assumed he would go whenever he thought at any length about leaving. It was as far as he could go, and to him it had always seemed the closest possible place to Heaven, or at least non-being— someplace where the climate was always the same, and there were lots of fruit trees.

He still thought of joining the army, somehow. Envisioning himself in the front lines, cut down recklessly charging Germans so that at least he could say he gave his life for something. But he was aware of how weak his eyes had grown through all the years of writing out sermons, and pawing through books of theology. How old and easily winded his body had become, compared to all these teenagers he saw shipping out every day. He would be just as likely to spend the duration as some clerical orderly, pecking out reports and camp regulations.

No, better to just accept that he could do nothing for anybody, really— nothing to stop this whole new world from coming into being.
California it would be.
But to do what?
Work in a defense plant, maybe, and serve as one more cog in this bright new machine of a world? To preach on the street corner, then, like all those whose faith he so envied?

He walked into the bathroom and ran some cold water into the porcelain basin by the sink. Taking off his reading spectacles, he splashed it over his face, then looked into the cabinet mirror above the sink as he dried himself with a cloth. He pulled out his comb next, and started to experiment, brushing his hair forward and back. Putting his glasses on and off. Trying to make his face go as blank as possible, so that it seemed to him his entire personality slipped away. Leaving him as anonymous as possible, a wholly different person, facing himself there in the mirror—

It scared him, losing himself there, and he turned away. Thinking that he might go mad if he stared any longer—wondering how his sister kept from doing it, all these years on her own. He went back to walking around the room, noticing how bone white it was, reminding him of something. White, pearled bedspread, painted white furniture and furnishings and drapes—even a white ceiling fan over the bed. All designed, he knew, to make the room look as light and airy and jim-clean as possible against the season's moldering humidity outside.
That is what they love about their color, it is the color of germlessness, of sterility. Of blissful blankness—

Today, though, was a beautiful, light day, and he raised the shade of the nearest window. The window itself was already open, but he pulled the screen up as well, telling himself it would let the newly cleansed air in as quickly as possible. He stood in front of the open window for a long moment, breathing it in. Staring down at the slow procession of traffic at the intersection below, at the heads of people crossing the street. He leaned far out over the windowsill, closing his eyes, trying to concentrate on just what it was he was going to do in his new, independent life—