The summer before I first saw New York, and that was fourteen years ago, we used to sit talking in the kitchen, our voices strumming away the whole lazy day; and what we talked about mostly was the city where I was soon to go. It was her understanding that there were no trees there, nor flowers, and she’d heard it said that most of the people lived underground or, if not underground, in the sky. Furthermore, there were “no nourishin’ vittles,” no good butterbeans, black-eyes, okra, yams, sausage—like we had at home. And it’s cold, she said, yessireebobtail, go on up in that cold country, time we see you again your nose will have freeze and fall off.
But then Mrs. Bobby Lee Kettle brought over some picture slides of New York, and after that Selma began telling her friends that when I went North she was going with me. The town seemed to her suddenly shriveled and mean. And so my aunts bought her a round-trip ticket, the idea being that she should ride up with me, turn around and go back. Everything was fine until we reached the depot; and there Selma began to cry, and say that she couldn’t go, that she would die so far from home.
It was a sad winter, inside and out. For a child the city is a joyless place. Later on, when one is older and in love, it is the double vision of sharing with your beloved which gives experience texture, shape, significance. To travel alone is to journey through a wasteland. But if you love enough, sometimes you can see for yourself, and for another, too. That is the way it was with Selma.
I saw twice over everything: the first snow, and skaters skimming in the park, the fine fur coats of the funny cold country children, the Chute-the-Chute at Coney, subway chewing-gum machines, the magical Automat, the islands in the river and the glitter upon the twilight bridge, the blue upward floating of a Paramount band, the men who came in the courtyard day after day and sang the same ragged, hoarse songs, the magnificent fairy tale of a ten-cent store where one went after school to steal things; I watched, listened, storing up for the quiet kitchen-hours when Selma would say, as she did, “Tell stories about that place, true stories now, none of them lies.” But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t remember, because it was as though I’d been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.
BROOKLYN (1946)
An abandoned church, a FOR RENT sign defacing its baroque façade, towers black and broken at the corner of this lost square; sparrows nest among the stone flowers carved above its chalked-up door (Kilroy Was Here, Seymour Loves Betty, You Stink!); inside, where sunlight falls on shattered pews, all manner of stray beasts have found a home: one sees misty cats watching from its windows, hears queer animal cries, and neighborhood children, who dare each other to enter there, come forth toting bones they claim as human (yeah, they is so! I’m tellin’ yuh; the guy was kilt).
Definitive in its ugliness, the church for me symbolizes some elements of Brooklyn: if a similar structure were destroyed, I have the uneasy premonition that another, equally old and monstrous, would swiftly be erected, for Brooklyn, or the chain of cities so-called, has, unlike Manhattan, no interest in architectural change. Nor is it lenient toward the individual: in despair one views the quite endless stretches of look-alike bungalows, gingerbread and brownstones, the inevitable empty, ashy lot where the sad, sweet, violent children, gathering leaves and tenement-wood, make October bonfires, the sad, sweet children chasing down these glassy August streets to Kill the Kike! Kill the Wop! Kill the Dinge!—a custom of this country where the mental architecture, like the houses, is changeless.
Manhattan friends, unwilling to cope with the elaborately dismal subway trip (Oh, B., do come, I swear to you it takes only forty minutes, and honest, you don’t have to change trains but three times), say so-sorry to any invitation. For this reason I’ve often daydreamed of leasing and renovating the church: who could resist visiting so curious a residence?
As matters stand I have two rooms in a brownstone duplicated by twenty others on the square; the interior of the house is a grimy jungle of Victoriana: lily-pale, plump-faced ladies garbed in rotting Grecian veils prance tribally on wallpaper; in the hall an empty, tarnished bowl for calling cards and a hat tree gnarled like a spruce glimpsed on the coast of Brittany are elegant mementos from Brooklyn’s less blighted days; the parlor bulges with dusty fringed furniture, a family history in daguerreotype parades across an old untuned piano, everywhere antimacassars are like little crocheted flags declaring a state of Respectability, and when a draught goes through this room beaded lamps tinkle Oriental tunes.
However, there are telephones: two upstairs, three down, and 125 in the basement; for it is in the basement that my landladies are more or less locked to a switchboard: Mrs. Q., a waddling, stunted woman with a red bulldog face, knobby lavender eyes and bright orange, unbelievable hair which, like her daughter Miss Q., she wears wild and waist-length, is a suspicious person, and her suspicion is the sort that goes with those who, despising everything, are looking for a reason.
Poor Miss Q. is simply tired; soft and honeyed, she labors under what is essentially a birth-to-death fatigue, and at times I wonder whether she is really Miss Q. or Zasu Pitts. Nevertheless, there is established between us an agreeable rapport.
It is based principally on the fact that we are both harassed by hair-raising headaches. Almost every day she sneaks upstairs, and giggling at her naughty daring, begs an aspirin; her mother, a devotee of Bernarr MacFadden, forbids aspirin and all medicine as “stew from the devil’s stove.” Their story is an old story: Mr. Q., “a very decidedly prominent mortician,” just “passed away with no word of warning while reading the New York Sun,” leaving his wife and spinster daughter to “go on living with no visible means of doing so,” because “a crook got Papa to invest all his money in a factory to make artificial funeral wreaths.”
So she and her mother set up a telephone-answering service in the basement. Day and night for ten years they’d alternated intercepting calls for persons out-of-town or not at home. “Oh, it’s a misery,” says Miss Q. with counterfeit despondency, for this career-woman role is the realest illusion of her illusioned life. “I tell you God’s truth, I couldn’t count the years since I’ve had a straight hour’s rest. Mama’s right there on the job, too, bless her soul, but Mama’s got a good many complaints, you know, and I just have to practically tie her in the bed. Sometimes when it’s late at night and my head starts to hurt—why, I look at the switchboard, and suddenly it’s like all those long wires were arms and fingers squeezing me to death.”
Upon occasion Mrs. Q. has been known to visit a Turkish bath near Borough Hall, but her tired daughter’s isolation is absolute; if one is to believe her, she has left the basement only once in eight years, and on this holiday she went with her mother to watch Mr. MacFadden do calisthenics on the stage of Carnegie Hall.
In dread I some nights listen as Mrs. Q. comes heaving up the stairs, presently to present herself at my door; standing there, shrouded in a sleazy sateen kimono, her sunset-colored hair falling Viking-fashion, she regards me with a baleful glitter. “Two more,” she says, her hairy baritone voice suggesting fire and brimstone. “We saw them from the window, two whole families riding by in moving vans.”
When she has squeezed dry the lemon of her sourness, I ask, “Families of what, Mrs. Q.?”
“Africans,” she announces with a righteous owl-like blink, “the whole neighborhood’s turning into a black nightmare; first Jews, now this; robbers and thieves, all of them—makes my blood run cold.”
Though I suspect Mrs. Q. herself does not realize it, this is not a performance, she is seriously frightened: what is going on outside corresponds with nothing she has known; the husband whose mind she fed upon is gone, and she herself, having possessed merely borrowed attitudes, has never owned an idea. She has had fixed on every door an abnormal number of catches and locks, a few of the windows are barred, there is a mongrel with an ear-splitting bark: someone without, some shapeless someone, desires to be within.
Each step remarks her weight as she descends the stairs; below, an image, her own, is groping on the mirror: not recognizing Mrs. Q., she pauses, her breath coming heavy as she wonders who is waiting there: a chill starts in her bones: two more today, more tomorrow, a flood is rising, her Brooklyn is the lost Atlantis, even her reflection on the mirror (a wedding present, remember? forty years: oh, what has happened, tell me, God?), even it is someone, something. “Good night,” she calls.
The locks go clink-clunk, the gates are closed; 125 telephones
