Atlantis: Three Tales (5 page)

So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy'd won in Mrs. Fitzgarn's and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa's sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama's yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama's flowers and she'd just about skinned him alive and—again—about the laughter at Hubert's letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out.

Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: “I think we can let him stop now.”

Hap's wife said: “It's so good to hear how things are going. And it's so good to have you up here, Sam.”

Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he'd grown.

Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now.

On the way back to Hubert's rooms Sam
saw
his first skyscrapers—late that evening, when it was already dark. They'd stopped to stroll in
Mount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle's at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November's-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. “Those lights over there, like pearls—that you can just see?—” Hubert explained—“
those
are skyscrapers . . . mostly.”

Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether—a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeral: the idea of a city—with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train.

When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. “Now doesn't she look older than the rocks among which she sits?” Hubert asked.

“What's
that
supposed to mean?” Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt.

“My rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and
she
doesn't care—”

“
Hu-bert
—!” Clarice objected.

“I'm teasing you,” he said.

She stood. “Now what Sam—
Eshu!
” Clarice pulled her coat around her—“Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That's the way really to see New York.” (Sam had already realized Clarice was a person who said “really to see” and “truly to think.” She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. “After all, we've been here longer than most of these crackers!” It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. “And that's why you will not hear me split my infinitives!” “Or hear her say, even jokingly,” Hubert added, “a girl like I.' ” That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, “That's the city at its best—
Eshu!”
A second time she sneezed.

Hubert moved toward her. “We better get you home.”

Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires—so different from what burned in Sam.

On their way down, wrapped 'round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice's body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she'd leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert's arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: “Over the bridge—
Eshu!
That's what I'd want to do.”

Sam's first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn't fast enough. Perez—the loud, bony one—said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn't be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to
learn
how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn't hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez?—had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they'd worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out.

There really wasn't enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home—trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That's why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren't making any money themselves.

Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris's
men's haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street—mostly packing things down in, and getting things up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tinsel strung in front of the counter surprised him. And the heavy black girl who worked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home—though she had none of Milly's sense of humor—wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weeks away.

Indeed, Sam was astonished at how little of Christmas stayed with him that year: he and Hubert celebrated it, of course. He gave Hubert an embossed leather notebook, which cost two dollars. Hubert gave him three sets of long johns, which was supposed to be kind of funny, but Sam started wearing them that morning: they were a pretty good idea. And Corey and Elsie had a tree hung with both glass and colored-paper ornaments, strung with cranberries and yarns of popcorn and cotton wool all around its base, just like at home; but (and it was the first time Sam had ever experienced this, so that for a few days it really bothered him) it just didn't
feel
like Christmas.

When it was over, the only thing that remained with any vividness was a pre-Christmas Saturday morning trip to the post office for
Elsie and Corey, to mail the three shopping bags full of gifts back to Raleigh. (One bag was Hubert's and his.) The building like a fort—

The lines of people—

Within, pine bows were draped all around the upper molding on the marble walls—

Bells of shiny red and silver paper hung, soundless, in each corner. Black rubber mats were splayed over the floor, slopping with the slush people tracked about in rundown shoes and open galoshes with jingling clasps. Wreaths with red berries and red ribbon were wired to the doors. But even inside, the marble room was chill and damp enough for your breath to drift away in clouds.

Were all these black and yellow and tan and brown faces, in all these lines in front of all the brass-barred windows, sending presents back to some ever-shifting, generalized, and hopelessly unlocatable place (but never baffling the postal readers of the carefully printed or clumsily scrawled addresses on brown paper under twine) called home? Certainly, to look at the bags and parcels they carried, it seemed so.

The clerks behind the bars, Sam had noticed, were all white.

Postal clerks were white at home too, but there were only three windows in the post office he went to in Raleigh. Here, between marble columns—and it wasn't even the central post office—ten windows lined the wall, so he'd just expected, well . . . maybe
some
dark faces behind the squared brass bars.

With broad, brown cheekbones, brown eyes large and crossed, and wearing an old black coat, a girl settled herself next to him, to stare up. From within her blunt, strabismic gaze, a glint of blue surfaced in Sam's mind—from the staring boy back on the train. Then it sank into the estuary of her curiosity, to swirl away. Looking down at her and in a voice more friendly than he felt, Sam asked her age-absent stare (was she eleven? was she fifteen?): “Now who are you?”

She held up her hand to him, or rather her wrist—with her fingers bent down. The hand was deformed—or at least . . . its deformity surprised, even shocked, him: the forefinger was thumb-thick and longer than the middle, which was, in turn, longer than the ring finger, which was longer than the little—all of them, indeed, fatter than fingers were supposed to be. The nails were dirty, spiky. Her teeth were set apart in bluish gum—some of the lower ones, Sam realized, missing. “What's your name?” he asked again, of this unappealing child.

The woman behind him said, “She's showing you her wrist beads.” Then—small, brownskinned, with nicely done hair and a green cloth coat (the child's hair stuck out in tufts, from under a gray kerchief tied not under her chin but off center by her cheek, the cloth ends frazzled like something someone had sucked on)—the woman took the girl's wrist and held it up. Black-gloved fingers moved a band of white beads from under the threadbare cuff. “Baby beads—just like when you're born. In the hospital.” (Sam had been born at home, and had had the details of Doctor Haley's three-in-the-morning visit, when they'd thought there might be complications—but there weren't—recounted to him many times.) Each bead had a black letter on it.

“See,” the woman said. “E-
L-L-A
A-
B-L-I-R
 . . . this is Ella Ablir.” Each lettered bead had two holes in it. Running through were, Sam saw, not threads but wires, twisted together below the pudgy wrist. The woman smiled. “She's looking at you because you're white.”

“No.” Sam smiled. “I'm afraid I'm not. I'm colored, too, just like everybody else here.”

“Oh, I'm
sorry
 . . . !” The woman was suddenly and greatly distressed—while again Sam glanced at the white clerk behind the bars and at the
woman at his window in red coat and red hat, with thick-heeled shoes buttoning inches up stockings white as some nurse's: she seemed to be buying many small stamps for a penny or two pennies, but wasn't sure how many she wanted; now she asked for two more, no three more—well, maybe another two; and one more please? Thank you. Now, if I could just have two more of this kind—please?

“Sometimes,” Sam said, “when people first meet me, they think I am. But I'm not.”

“Yes. Of course,” the woman said. “If I had just been paying attention, I would've seen it.”

Sam looked down at the girl, who still stared up: “Hello, Ella,” he said, becoming aware that, behind the woman, five or six other children shuffled—girls, most of them. No, all of them. Ragged, unkempt, each had something distinctly wrong with her.

“Where're y'all from?” Sam asked.

“We're from the Manhattan Hospital,” the woman said, indicating a rectangle of cardboard pinned to her lapel, with something printed on it, “for the Insane.” The girl had the same cardboard pinned lopsidedly to her coat. So did the girls behind. The eyes of a tall and stoop-shouldered girl did not look in the same direction. “Over on the island. But they ain't really insane at all.” She smiled. “Not even a little bit of it. They're just some very nice little girls—who all been very, specially good. And I been out with them since eight o'clock this morning, taking them around on a Christmas pass.”