The Street (33 page)

She hoped what Mrs. Hedges had said about Jones not bothering her any more was true, for she knew she couldn't force herself to register a complaint against him. The thought of telling some indifferent desk sergeant about the details of his attack on her was one she didn't relish.

But that's what she should do. Then she thought, Suppose they locked him up for thirty days or sixty days or ninety days, or whatever the sentence was for such things. Then what? He couldn't be kept in jail indefinitely. He was the kind of man who would carry a grudge against her as long as he lived and once out of jail she was certain he would make an effort to strike back at her.

Harlem wasn't a very big place and if he was dead
set on revenge he wouldn't have any difficulty in finding her. Besides, there was Bub to be considered, for instead of harming her he might seek to avenge himself on Bub.

No. She wouldn't go to the police about him. She paused for a stop light. Have you got used to the idea of staying there? she asked herself.

From now on they would have to live so carefully, so frugally, so miserly that each pay-check would yield a small sum to be put in the bank. After a while they would be able to move. It would be hard. She might as well get used to that, too.

They would have to live so close to a narrow margin that it wouldn't really be like living; never going anywhere, never buying the smallest item that wasn't absolutely essential, even examining essential ones and eliminating them whenever possible. It was the only way they could hope to move. She thought with regret of the quarter she had so lavishly given the hat-check girl. She ought to go back and tell the girl it was a mistake, that she was angry when she gave it to her, and she tried to picture how the girl's face would look—startled, incredulous at first, and then sullen, outraged.

Nights at home she would start studying in order to get a higher civil service rating. Perhaps by the time the next exam came up, she would be able to pass it. The job at the Casino that had looked like such an easy, pat, just-right thing was out of the question and her common sense should have told her that in the beginning. Yet she found she was thinking of it with regret and of all the things it would have meant—those things that seemed to be right
within reach last night when Boots said, ‘The job is yours, baby.'

And she began thinking about him. ‘All you gotta do is be nice to me, baby.' She hadn't done or said anything that would indicate that she had no intention of being ‘nice' to him. It must have been something else that had made him lose interest in her so quickly.

She tried to remember all the things he had said to her to find some clue that would explain his indifference. For he had been indifferent, she decided. He had sat there at the table tonight, making no effort to talk, absorbed in his own thoughts, and even when he had talked to her he had looked at her impersonally as though she were a stranger in whom he didn't have even a passing interest.

‘I could fall in love with you easy, baby.' He had said that just last night. And that first night she had met him, ‘The only thing I'm interested in is you.'

When he drove her home last night, he had scarcely spoken. He had made no effort to touch her. She sought a reason and remembered that he had fallen silent after the bouncer at the Casino told him Junto wanted to see him.

She walked a little faster. If Junto owned the Casino, then Boots worked for him. Even so, what could Junto have said to him that would make him lose his obvious desire for her so abruptly? It must have been something else that disturbed him, she decided. Perhaps it had something to do with his not being in the army, for she remembered how he couldn't conceal his annoyance when she persisted in asking him why he hadn't been drafted.

It didn't matter anyway. Perhaps it was just as well the thing had ended like this. At least she no longer had to duck and dodge away from his brutal hands. Even if she had been hired at a fat weekly salary, his complete lack of scruple might have been something she couldn't have coped with.

She pushed open the door of the apartment house where she lived. The hall was quiet. There was no movement in the pool of shadow that almost obliterated the cellar door. And she wondered if every time she entered the hall, she would inevitably seek to locate the tall, gaunt figure of the Super.

The cracked tile of the floor was grimy. The snow that had been tracked in from the street during the morning had melted and mixed with the soot and dust on the floor. She looked at the dark brown varnish on the doors, the dim light that came from the streaked light fixture overhead, the tarnished mail boxes, the thin, worn stair treads. And she thought time had a way of transforming things.

Only a few hours had elapsed since she stood in this same doorway, completely unaware of the dim light, the faded, dreary paint, the filth on the floor. She had looked down the length of this hall and seen Bub growing up in some airy, sunny house and herself free from worry about money. She had been able to picture him coming home from school to snacks of cookies and milk and bringing other kids with him; and then playing somewhere near-by, and all she had to do was look out of the window and see him because she was home every day when he arrived. And time and Boots Smith and Junto had pushed her right back in here, deftly removing that obscuring
cloud of dreams, so that now tonight she could see this hall in reality.

She started up the stairs. They went up and up ahead of her. They were steeper than she remembered them. And she thought vaguely of all the feet that had passed over them in order to wear the treads down like this—young feet and old feet; feet tired from work; feet that skipped up them because some dream made them less than nothing to climb; feet that moved reluctantly because some tragedy slowed them up.

Her legs were too tired to move quickly, so that her own feet refused to move at their usual swift pace. She became uneasily conscious of the closeness of the walls. The hall was only a narrow passageway between them. The walls were very thin, too, for she could hear the conversations going on behind the closed doors on each floor.

Radios were playing on the third and fourth floors. She tried to walk faster to get away from the medley of sound, but her legs refused to respond to her urging. ‘Buy Shirley Soap and Keep Beautiful' was blared out by an announcer's voice. The sounds were confusing. Someone had tuned in the station that played swing records all night, and she heard, ‘Now we have the master of the trumpet in Rock, Raleigh, Rock.'

That mingled with the sounds of a revival church which was broadcasting a service designed to redeem lost souls: ‘This is the way, sisters and brothers. This is the answer. Come all of you now before it's too late. This is the way.' As she walked along, she heard the congregation roar, ‘Preach it, brother,
preach it.' Suddenly a woman cried loud above the other sounds, ‘Lord Jesus is a-comin' now.'

The congregation clapped their hands in rhythm. It came in clear over the radio. And the sound mingled with the high sweetness of the trumpet playing ‘Rock, Raleigh, Rock,' and the soap program joined in with the plunking of a steel guitar, ‘If you wanta be beautiful use Shirley Soap.'

A fight started on the third floor. Its angry violence echoed up the stairs, mingling with the voices on the radio. The conversations that were going on behind the closed doors that lined the hall suddenly ceased. The whole house listened to the progress of the fight.

And Lutie thought, The whole house knows, just as I do, that Bill Smith, who never works, has come home drunk again and is beating up his wife. Living here is like living in a structure that has a roof, but no partitions, so that privacy is destroyed, and even the sound of one's breathing becomes a known, familiar thing to each and every tenant.

She sighed with relief when she reached the fifth floor. The stairs had seemed like a high, ever-ascending mountain because she was so tired. And then she thought, No, that wasn't quite true, because the way she felt at this moment was the way a fighter feels after he's been knocked down hard twice in succession, given no time to recover from the first smashing blow before the second one slams him back down again.

And the second blow makes him feel as though he were dying. His wind is gone. His heart hurts when it beats, and it goes too fast, so that a pain stays in his
chest. The air going in and out of his lungs adds to the pain. Blood pounds in his head, so that it feels dull, heavy. All he wants to do is crawl out of sight and lie down, not moving, not thinking. She knew how he would feel, because that about summed up what had happened to her, except that she had received, not two blows, but a whole scries of them.

Then she saw with surprise that there was a light under her door and she stopped thinking about how she felt. ‘Why isn't he asleep?' she said, aloud.

But Bub was asleep, so sound asleep that he didn't stir when she entered the room. He is afraid here alone, she thought, looking down at him. He was sprawled in the center of the studio couch, his legs and arms flung wide apart. The lamp on the table was shining directly in his face.

Each time she had come home from the Casino, he had been sleeping with the light on. Yes, he was definitely afraid. Well, she wouldn't be going out any more at night, leaving him alone. She switched the light off, thinking that it would be years now before he had a bedroom of his own. It was highly doubtful that he would ever have one, and there was still the problem of his having no place to go after school.

After she undressed and got into bed, she lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. She thought of Junto, who could so casually, so lightly, perhaps at a mere whim, and not even aware of what he was doing, thrust her back into this place, and of Boots Smith, who might or might not have been telling the truth, who might for purposes of his own have decided that she wasn't to be paid for singing. And
a bitter, angry feeling spread all through her, hardening and congealing.

She was stuck here on this street, in this dark, dirty house. It was going to take a long time to get out. She thought of the Chandlers and their friends in Lyme. They were right about people being able to make money, but it took hard, grinding work to do it—hard work and self-sacrifice. She was capable of both, she concluded. Furthermore, she would never permit herself to become resigned to living here. She had a sudden vivid recollection of the tragic, re-signed faces of the young girls and the old man she had seen in the spring. No. She would never become like that.

Her thoughts returned to Junto, and the bitterness and the hardness increased. In every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape. If she needed anything to spur her on, she thought, this fierce hatred, this deep contempt, for white people would do it. She would never forget Junto. She would keep her hatred of him alive. She would feed it as though it were a fire.

Bub woke up before she did. He had put the water for the oatmeal on to boil when she came into the kitchen.

She kissed him lightly. ‘You go get dressed while I fix breakfast.'

‘Okay.'

And then she remembered the light shining on his face while he was asleep. ‘Bub,' she said sternly, ‘you've got to stop going to sleep with the light on.'

He looked sheepish. ‘I fell asleep and forgot it.'

‘That's not true,' she said sharply. ‘I turned it out when I left. If you're scared of the dark, you'll just have to go to sleep while I'm here, so you won't be afraid, because this way the bill will be so big I'll never be able to pay it. Furthermore, I don't like lies. I've told you that over and over again.'

‘Yes, Mom,' he said meekly. He started to tell her just what it was like to be alone in the dark. But her face was shut tight with anger and her voice was so hard and cold that he decided he'd better wait until some other time.

It seemed to him that all that week she talked to him about money. She was impatient, she rarely smiled, and she only half-heard him when he talked to her. Every night after dinner she bent over a pile of books placed on the card table and stayed there silent, intent, writing down queer curves and hooks over and over until she went to bed. He decided he must have done something to displease her and he asked her about it.

‘Mom, you mad at me?'

They were eating supper. Lutie was startled by his question. ‘Why, of course not. What made you think I was?'

‘You sort of acted like it.'

‘No, I'm not mad at you. I couldn't be.'

‘What's the matter, Mom?'

She framed her answer carefully, trying not to let the hard, cold anger in her color her reply. She frowned, because her only explanation would have to be that they needed to save more than they were doing. ‘I've been worried about us,' she said. ‘We seem to spend so much money. I'm not able to save
very much. And we have to save, Bub,' she said earnestly, ‘so that we won't always have to live here.'

During the next week she made a conscious effort to stop talking to Bub about money. Yet some reference to it inevitably crept into her conversation. If she found two lights burning in the living room, she found herself turning one of them out, saying, ‘We've got to watch the bill.'

When she was mending his socks, she caught herself delivering a lecture about being careful and watching out for nails and splinters that might snag them. ‘They have to last a long time and new ones cost money.'

If he left a cake of soap soaking in the bowl in the bathroom, she pointed out how it wasted the soap and that little careless things ate into their meager budget. When she went to bed, she scolded herself roundly because it wasn't right to be always harping on the cost of living to Bub. On the other hand, if they didn't manage to save faster than she had been able to do so far, it would be months before they could move and moving was uppermost in her thoughts. So the next day she explained to him why it was necessary to move, and that they had to be careful with money if they were going to do it soon.