Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

THE BOY sat on the bed, watching me. Everything seemed tilted, he and the bed, as though about to slide off a cliff; this was because of my weariness and the angle at which I lay in the bed and the fact that it was so early in the morning.

I was a little frightened for a moment: but the boy smiled.

“Do you always get up so early?—what time is it?”

He laughed. “No. But I got some people to see today. It’s about seven.”

He was staring at me, making up his mind about something.

“Do you want me to make you some coffee?”

“No. No, stay in bed. You’ve really had it.” He watched me. “You were pretty drunk last night.”

“I know.”

“You remember everything?”

“Well—I think I do. Why? Did I do something terrible?”

He laughed again. “No. You were fine. You danced a lot and you laughed a lot. I think you were happy.”

“I think I was. Were you?”

He looked away, still smiling a little. “Oh, yeah,” he said.

I wanted to get back to sleep, but he was beginning to intrigue me, to wake me up. It was his smile. It made his face like a light. And his voice was rough, like a country boy’s voice, and he was big, and his manner was rough. But his smile was very shy and gentle.

“I’ve got to go now. Can I come to see you later?”

“I’ll be home all day—until it’s time to go to the theater.”

“Well. I’ll call you later.” He stood up. “If I don’t make it back before you go, you want me to pick you up after the show?”

“Yes. That’ll be good.”

“All right. See you.” He leaned down and kissed me quickly on the forehead. He started for the bedroom door.

“You got enough money?”

“I’m all right.” He smiled again, and disappeared. I heard the front door close behind him.

I wondered what I had got myself into.

I am at last about to leave the hospital. Pete has brought me my clothes. I do not want to see Caleb, but Caleb will be meeting the plane in New York—in spite of everything, or perhaps because of everything, I am still his little brother, and besides I am famous. Barbara cannot come East with me because the show is still running—though not doing very well—and she will be along presently to take me off to her suite, where I will spend what is left of this day and where I will spend the night. In the morning, I fly away.

Presently, some of the cast will be here with champagne; also, some of the press. But Barbara will be here before them. Pete is here already. I am dressed, and standing in the office with Dr. Evin. And since I am dressed and my hair has been cut and I am wearing my clothes and standing in my own skin, I feel—in a way—absolutely in control, delivered again to the land of the living. It is not yet and not now that Leo Proudhammer gives up the ghost! Not yet. Not now. Leo is a very tough little mother.

I am ready: dark-blue suit, blue tie, impeccable handkerchief, white shirt, Brazilian cufflinks, black pumps. I am a star again. I look it and I feel it. It is as though I had never been ill.

But Dr. Evin does not agree with me.

“You have been very ill. I counsel you not to forget that fact.” He looks at me very hard. “If you do not remember how ill you have been, you may very well become ill again. I tried to warn you at the beginning—do you remember?”

“Yes. Of course, I remember.”

He smiles. “I am not absolutely persuaded that you do—but I will not scold you any more. After all, I was very pleased, like the selfish man I am, to make your acquaintance. And I have more respect now than I did for the—stamina—of your tribe. I am not being racist.” We both laugh. “I mean the tribe of show business people.” Then, his face changed, he stood up. “Ah! Here is Miss King. Miss King, we deliver him back to you—very slightly damaged, but, with care, he should last”—he looks at me speculatively, smiling; I realized that he really had grown to like me—“oh, twenty, thirty years. If you do not try to drive him up the steep slopes.”

“I,” said Barbara, “will do anything you say, doctor. But you know, by now, what a stubborn child Leo is.” She kissed me. “Look at him! Where do you suppose he thinks he’s going, Dr. Evin? He’s dressed for an opening night. Darling,” she said, “you are merely going to walk to an elevator which is just down the hall and then be gently handed into a car which will drive you straight to my house, where you will immediately take off all those clothes and lie about in state.”

“I thought,” I said, “that I should look my best, in case of the newspapers. So all my fans will know that I’m recovered.”

“Oh” said Barbara, and looked at Dr. Evin, “I see. You certainly got him well, doctor, and all his fans are grateful.” She smiled, very happy, looking like a little girl. “Some of the cast have come by, and they’ve brought some champagne. Come, join us, doctor—then you can go home and have a nice, quiet heart attack.”

She laughed and took us both by the arm and we walked down the corridor to my old room.

There they were, the people with whom I’d been in the play so long. Perhaps, for others, it was only a play, but it was more than that for us, it was a part of our lives and this meant that we were now a part of each other. There really is a kind of fellowship among people in the theater and I’ve never seen it anywhere else, except among jazz musicians. Our relationships are not peaceful and they certainly are not static, but, in a curious way, they’re steady. I think it may be partly because we’re forced, in spite of the preposterous airs we very often give ourselves, to level with each other. Everybody knows what’s going on in the business, everybody has to know and so some lies cannot be told. One’s disasters are as public as one’s triumphs, and far more numerous; and everybody knows how it feels. And I think it’s also because we’re forced to depend on each other more than other people are. I shouldn’t think, for example, that trapeze artists are in the habit of having bitter fights with each other just before they climb the high ladder, and start somersaulting about in space. If the bar or the hand isn’t there when it’s supposed to be, well, then, without a net, that’s it. And in the theater, one’s always operating without a net. Of course, the theater is full of people whom no one can stand, and careers the mere existence of which fill one with wonder; but one becomes philosophical about this, for not even the most outrageous or destructive theatrical career can begin to rival some of the careers taking place in the world. Here was Andy, an Italian character actor who was playing a featured part in the play—we hadn’t worked together for years, but when we met again it was as though we’d never parted; and Amy, blonde, young, wispy, from the Bronx, with whom I’d never worked before, but whom I liked very much; and Sylvia, a fine, tough, mannish Negro character actress, whose age would now never be known, because her hometown courthouse had been burned to the ground—by Sylvia, some people said, and it wasn’t hard to see her doing it; and my adored, my steady and steadying Pete; and the chief electrician, Sando; and the doorman, John, and his wife; and my understudy, Alvin, whom I’d never liked very much, but liked today—he seemed to like me, too, and it wasn’t only because he knew I wasn’t coming back to the show; and some others. The room was crowded, very beautifully crowded. There were flowers and records and boxes of candy. Amy, her face very bright beneath a stylish velvet toque, came over to me with an envelope and an oddly shaped package. First, she kissed me ceremoniously, on both sides of my face.

“Everybody couldn’t come,” she said. “You know—some people take jobs on radio and television and stuff like that—and those peasants”—now she held the envelope very distastefully with her thumb and one finger—“have asked me to give you this.” I took the envelope from her, and opened it. It was a big card, with a caricature of me on the front as the skinniest boxer you ever saw, with the biggest, most frightened eyes, and the most awkward stance. On the outside, it said—because I’d scored a great triumph when I’d played this part in Cabin in the Sky—LITTLE JOE! And on the inside, it said, “We Glad You Win!” It was signed by every member of the crew and company. It was very nice. We were all laughing. My little nurse came in, with a tray of glasses.

“And now,” said Amy gravely, “you must open this. This is from all of us.”

I took the package, which was surprisingly heavy. I wondered how Amy had managed to carry it. I sat down on the bed, to open it. They were all watching me.

I finally got the package open. Inside, there were two bronze lions, replicas of the lions in Trafalgar Square. The card said, “For Leo, the lion. Long may he wail.”

“You can use them as bookends. Or paperweights,” said Amy.

“Or in order to get a taxi,” said Barbara.

We all broke out laughing, and that saved me from crying. I grabbed Amy and kissed her and I kissed Sylvia and Barbara and I hugged all the men and Pete said, “Here goes,” and he opened the champagne. “A toast,” said Pete, and he raised his glass and looked at me.

Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain. Something like this message I seemed to read in Pete’s eyes as he raised his glass and looked at me. His eyes held my journey, and his own. His eyes held the years of terror, trembling, hatred, scorn, inhuman isolation; the YMCA, the Mills Hotel, the winter streets, the subways, the rooftops, the public baths, the public toilets, the filthy socks, the nights one wept alone on some vermin-infested bed; the faithless loves, the lost loves, the hope of love; the many deaths, and the fear of death; in all of this, some style evolving, some music endlessly being played, ringing inexorable changes on the meaning of the blues. His look was shrewd, ironic, loving. He knew how frightened I had been. He knew how frightened he had been.

“A toast,” he said, “to our baby, little Leo—we’re glad you came back to us, baby, and don’t you be making no more journeys like that in a hurry, do you hear?”

We laughed again. We had to laugh, perhaps I most of all. I said, “May I propose a toast? Let me propose a toast.”

“Hear, hear!” said Barbara.

And then, for a moment, I did not know what to say; and I looked at them and they looked at me. I met the eyes of Alvin, my understudy. Alvin was a very good-looking black, or, rather, colored cat, a little bit older than I, and bigger than I; and I am not good-looking. I abruptly understood, as though I had just come back from the dead—which was, after all, nearly the literal truth; and a tremor went through me; I saw Barbara’s face, and I was incredibly aware of the sun coming through the curtains—that I had been wrong in supposing that Alvin did not like me. It wasn’t that. It was just that I fucked up his sense of reality. He did not know why what, as he supposed, had happened to me had not happened to him. According to the order which had created him and in which, for all his stridency, he yet absolutely believed, he had been dealt a much better hand than mine. This meant, for me, that Alvin did not know the ruthless rules of the game, and since he really did not know what had happened to me, did not know what had happened to him. As long as he did not know this, no one and nothing could help him. He would spend his life envying the blood in the shoes of others. I remembered myself trying to say this to Christopher. And I dropped my eyes from Alvin’s, thinking of Christopher’s response, and thinking of Caleb. I had supposed that Alvin disliked me because I am a better actor than he. And I am a better actor. But in that fact, precisely, lies hidden the unspeakable question, the unendurable truth.

“It is not important,” I said, “to be an actor. The world is full of actors—most of them don’t know that they are acting. And it’s not important to be a star—most stars can’t act.” I stopped. They were still watching me. I had struck a more somber note than I had meant to strike. I looked for Barbara’s face, and Pete’s face. Their faces reassured me. They knew their boy. It had cost them something: and they would never let me see the bill. “Well,” I said, “if those things are not important, let me say that it is important—it is beautiful—to know, when you stand on your feet again, that so many people are glad to see you standing. I’m glad to be back.” I raised my glass. “But if you hadn’t wanted me back, I might very well not be here. Let me drink to you,” I said, “and let me thank you for holding on to me. I’ll never forget it.” I had no more words, and I drained my champagne glass. They stomped their feet lightly on the floor, for their hands were not free. Barbara drained her glass as I drained mine, and set it down and clapped her hands. It was—somehow—the most extraordinary sound.

“We’ve got to send the prince home in a few minutes,” Pete said. “Who wants more champagne? We got one more bottle.”

Then, I sat on the bed and I looked at my records, the records they had bought for me: Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles and Miles Davis and Nina Simone and Joe Williams and Joe Tex and Lena Horne; and I thought what a comfort they would be to me, what a ball I would have with them in the south of France, where I would now be going, to sit in a borrowed villa and think over my life and recover my health and eventually read the script and sign the contract which would bring me back to work again. I realized that I was frightened. This would be the first time in more than twenty years that I had not, in one way or another, been working. When a worker is not working, what does a worker do? I knew that I was chilled by the fear of what I might find in myself with all my harness off, my obligations canceled, no lawyers, no agents, no producers, no television appearances, no civil-rights speeches, no reason to be here or there, no lunches at the Plaza, no dinners at Sardi’s, no opening nights, no gossip columnists, no predatory reporters, no Life and Loves of Leo Proudhammer (in six installments, beginning in this issue!), no need to smile when I did not want to smile, no need, indeed, to do anything but be myself. But who was this self? Had he left forever the house of my endeavor and my fame? Or was he merely having a hard time breathing beneath the rags and the rubble of the closets I had not opened in so long?

Amy sat down on the bed beside me. She said, “I suppose you’ve heard the rumors?”

“I never listen to rumors,” I said, “and if you want to stay alive in this business, you won’t, either.”

She laughed. She was a very, very attractive girl—not pretty exactly, but, then, I don’t like pretty girls; but attractive, really attractive. Her teeth were a little big, and her face was a little too thin—she was very thin altogether, no hips at all, or, rather, the kind of hips that don’t exist until you hold them. My body had been functioning all those weeks I’d been in bed, and, abruptly, seriously, I was terribly horny. I shifted a little bit away from her, more astonished than embarrassed. This particular aspect of Lazarus’ return had not before occurred to me: but it certainly made sense. To come up from the place where one thought one was dead means that one becomes greedy for life, and life is many things, but it is, above all, the touch of another. The touch of another: no matter how transient, at no matter what price.

Then I remembered that I was nearly forty, and this frenzy, so I had been told, occurred in men of my age. I looked at Amy again. We had one very short, but very crucial scene in the play. We had been face to face for months, but I had never looked at her before. It scarcely seemed possible. I thought, You’ll never work again, old buddy, you’ve had it, you’ve gone completely to pieces. I was looking at her face, but I was thinking of her cunt, of what it would be like to go down on this skinny little girl, how it would feel to hold her, to go inside her, how we should move together, and how she would be when she came.

She did not seem to know what I was thinking. She said, “Well. The rumor is that they’re going to halt production on Big Deal—they were just about ready to go, you know—until you’re well enough to play the reporter.”

“That’s quite a rumor,” I said. But I was pleased. A kind of chill made me cough. Barbara looked sharply in my direction, and so did Pete. Pete drained his glass, and Barbara picked up her mink. Alvin came over and sat down on the bed.

“I’m glad you’re going to be all right, fellow,” he said. And he really meant it. He meant it as much as he could mean it.

“Thank you,” I said. But I was suddenly very tired. I thought, You’ve been ill and you’re not well yet. I thought, Maybe you’ll never really get well again.

“We got to clear this joint now, folks!” Pete cried. “We got to take the patient home!”

“Isn’t it a nice rumor?” Amy asked. “Especially—you know—to take away with you?”

“What rumor?” asked Alvin.

I put my fist under Amy’s chin, and smiled at her. “Rumors, rumors. It’s sweet of you to tell me. But I’m afraid it’ll be a long time before I’m ready to work again.” I looked at Alvin. “I’m going to go away,” I said. “I’m going to go back to the Mediterranean and sit there dressed in nothing but those loincloths we used to wear in Africa before the goddamn missionaries got there, and look at the sea and have some sweet girl take care of me and think about my life and walk up and down the beach and read some of the books I’ve been saying I was going to read and roll in that sea and get burned in that sun and eat and eat”—Lord, how quickly I had got drunk!—“and maybe weep a little and pull myself together. But it won’t be the same self. I guarantee you that.” I stood up because I didn’t want Barbara to be embarrassed by suggesting that I stand up. “After that,” I said suddenly, for Barbara’s sake, sober again, and smiling, “I might go back to work. Or I might join the church. Except there isn’t any church.” I was not sober. I was very melancholy.

“There’re a whole lot of churches, man,” Alvin said.

“Exactly my point,” I said, and straightened, really straightened this time, then bent to pick up my card and my records and my lions. “You’ve got to forgive me. Now, I’ve got to go.”

I bent, and kissed Amy on the cheek. Alvin stood, and we shook hands. Dr. Evin took the records and the card from me and Pete took the lions.

“Let’s go, old buddy,” he said, and took my arm and we started for the door. But I stopped to kiss my dazzled little nurse on the forehead.

“Be good,” I said. “And come to see me soon—soon, I hope.”

“You know I will,” she said. “You know I will.” She looked dazed and radiant and cheerful—this poor little girl who had had to empty my shit and wash my ass and my cock and balls. She would touch, for many days, the spot on her forehead where I had kissed her. Her face taught me, on the instant, something of the male power and the female hope, something of the male and female loneliness, and it deepened, on the instant, my already sufficiently bitter awareness of the bottomless and blasphemous hypocrisy of my country.

Then—as they cheered—we walked out of my room, Dr. Evin, and Barbara, and Pete, and I, down the corridor to the elevator.

“I hope we will meet again,” said Dr. Evin. “I know you know I do not mean that the way it may sound.” He smiled.

“I would like very much to see you again,” I said. “You have been very nice to me.”

“Ah! that was very difficult,” he said, and smiled again. The elevator came, and he held the door and gave the packages he carried to Pete. “Good-bye,” he said to Pete, and “Good-bye,” he said to Barbara. There was a pause. Barbara kissed him on the cheek, and Pete, heavy-laden, smiled. “Take care of yourself,” said the doctor gravely to me. Then he allowed the elevator doors to close, and we started down.

“There’ll be some reporters waiting downstairs,” Pete said. “I thought it was better not to have them come up.” He grinned. “Reporters and champagne don’t mix.”

“We’re going to be very tyrannical,” Barbara said, “and get rid of them in a hurry. Reporters. The most loathsome parasites on earth. If they had any self-respect, they’d find a rock and crawl under it.” The elevator landed, the doors opened. She took my arm. Pete preceded us.

There they were, about ten or twelve of them, with notebooks and cameras. There was a television crew in the streets. It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be facing a gang of reporters, to have the camera’s lights flashing around your head and in your eyes. It occasions a peculiarly subtle and difficult war within oneself. In a bitter way, the fact that one is half blinded by the staccato lights is a help, for it means that one can’t see anything very clearly, especially not the faces of the reporters. If one really looked into those faces, one would certainly blow one’s cool. But the war I mentioned is subtle and difficult—and, at bottom, base—because everyone loves attention, loves to be thought important. Here are all these people, the innocent ego proudly contends, here to talk to you, here because of you. You are, literally, then, one among countless millions. You are news. Whatever you do is news. But it does not take long to realize, at least assuming that one wishes to live, that to be news is really to be nothing; that the attention paid to one’s vicissitudes is merely the most cunning way yet devised of making the adventure of one’s life a farce. He woke up this morning, or he didn’t—either way, it’s a story—and he brushed his teeth or he didn’t, and then he peed, or didn’t, and then he shit, or he couldn’t, and then he fucked his wife or his broad, or he fucked his boy or his boy fucked him, or they blew each other, or they didn’t—it’s a story, either way, any way: it is all, all, there in the eager faces of the reporters.

“How are you, Mr. Proudhammer! Good to see you on your feet!”

“Actually,” I said, unwisely, “I’m leaning on Miss King.”

Pete took the ball, and carried it. “Mr. Proudhammer, as you know, has been ill, and we can’t have him leaning on Miss King too long. So, let’s get it over with, quick.”

“Would you like a chair, Mr. Proudhammer?” somebody asked, and before I could answer somebody brought me one. I looked briefly at Barbara, who nodded, and I sat down.

“We hear you’re going to do the movie Big Deal. Is that true?”

“I won’t be working for awhile. And no one’s approached me about it yet.”

“What are your immediate plans, Mr. Proudhammer?”

“To go away and rest.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll be in France for awhile.”

“Why France? Any particular reason?”

“I have friends in France. One of them has a house by the sea.”

“Big deal!” somebody said, and they laughed. The lights flashed and flashed, their faces gaped and grinned. I don’t tire easily; but I was very tired now. My God, I thought, I must have been goddamn fucking sick.

“How do you feel about that, Mr. Proudhammer?—about Big Deal? I mean, a few years ago, they wouldn’t have dreamed of putting a Negro in that part.”

“You must forgive me. I don’t know the script.”

I thought of Christopher, and I almost said, Who is this mighty they, and who and where is Negro? but I thought, Fuck it. What these wide-eyed, gimlet-eyed, bright-eyed cock-suckers do not know is about to kill them. Before my eyes.

“Well, it’s a role which could be played by any actor. I mean, it’s got nothing to do with race.”

Don’t blow your cool, said Leo to Leo.

“Oh? Then that’s a great departure for the industry. I’m honored that they thought of me.”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Proudhammer. You’re one of the biggest stars we have. No Negro’s ever made it as big as you. It must mean a lot to—your people.”

Don’t blow your cool, baby. Do not blow your cool.

I said, “I don’t think it helps them to pay the rent.”

“Oh,” said a lady reporter, some fat bitch from Queens—I just knew it—“there are much more important things than just paying the rent, don’t you think so, Mr. Proudhammer?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

Barbara touched me on the shoulder.

They scribbled it all in their notebooks—God knows what they were scribbling. God knows I didn’t care. I looked at Pete, and I stood up. Pete moved the chair away, and Barbara took my arm. Pete said, “We’ve got to go now, folks. I’m sorry, but it’s doctor’s orders.”

We started moving, and lights started flashing again.

“Miss King! What are your plans?”

“Our tour ends next month, in Hollywood. And I stay on, then, to do a movie, Jethro’s Daughter.”

They wrote it all down.

“And when will you and Mr. Proudhammer be working together again?”

“Soon,” said Barbara.

“On stage or on screen?”

“Both. And on television.”

“Any firm commitments—anything that can be announced?”

“We’re reading scripts.”

“Will you be in touch with Mr. Proudhammer while he is abroad?”

“I will, or we’ll get a new postmaster.”

“Miss King—I know you won’t mind my saying this, you surely must have heard it already—it has sometimes been suggested that your—ah—friendship with Mr. Proudhammer has sometimes tended to compromise your career. That is—putting it bluntly—because some sections of the country still hold very backward ideas about race, and you are white and Mr. Proudhammer is a Negro, and you are friends, some roles which might have been offered to you were not offered to you. Is this true?”

“Is it? I have no idea. I was a little girl when they did Gone With the Wind, but since then I’ve been doing just fine, thank you.”

We got into the wind, and there was the television crew, and a man thrust a mike at me and Pete grabbed his arm and held it.

“This man has been sick,” he said. “Now, if you want to talk to him, you come on gentle, or you can forget it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rough.”

“One question,” said Barbara, “and one question only. And if your crew isn’t ready, it’s just too bad. Mr. Proudhammer is still under a doctor’s care.”

He didn’t like her tone. He looked at me and he looked at her. And if we had not been Barbara King and Leo Proudhammer, victims of the economy in a way which it was quite beyond his poor power to understand—looking at Barbara in her mink, and me in my very expensive trenchcoat, and seeing the great black limousine waiting at the curb—what he really felt would have come rushing out, and our blood would have been all over the streets. Along with his, I must say. We looked each other in the eye. He held the mike. The cameras rolled in.

“You’ve put up a very gallant battle against death,” he said—Fuck you! I thought—“and all of America, along with Miss King, I’m sure, have been praying that you would live. One question, one question only, Mr. Proudhammer, because we understand that you are still under a doctor’s care: how does it feel to know that you mean so much to so many people?”

I thought of Christopher. I thought of Barbara. I said, “It makes me feel a tremendous obligation to stay well. It makes me know that I did not make myself—I do not belong to me.”

He looked tremendously baffled, but he smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Proudhammer.”

“Thank you,” I said. And we got into the car.

Amy passed, talking to Alvin, then Sylvia, talking to Andy. They all waved. The car moved forward, up a hill.

I really can’t bear any of the American cities I know, and I know, or at least I’ve traveled through, most of them. And most of them seem very harsh and hostile, and they are exceedingly ugly. When an American city has any character, any flavor at all, it’s apt to be, as in the case, for example, of Chicago, rather like a soup which has everything in it, but which is now old, tepid, and rancid, with all of the ingredients turned sour. All of the American cities seem boiling in a kind of blood pudding, thick, sticky, foul, and pungent, and it can make you very sad to walk through, say, New Orleans and ask yourself just why a city with no unconquerable physical handicaps, after all, should yet be so relentlessly uninhabitable. Some key, I suppose, is afforded by the faces, which also seem uninhabitable—at least by any of the more promising human attributes. They look like people who are, or who would like to be, cops; or else, with a sad emphasis, they look like people who would not like to be cops. And I’ve often thought that if Hitler had had the California police force working for him, he would surely be in business still—not that I am persuaded that he ever retired; the business was his in name only—but, distrustfully, all the same, I like San Francisco because it is on so many hills, one’s always looking, walking, up or down, and because you can walk by the water and you can buy crabs by the water and because there are so many faces there of people who do not want to be cops. I am probably wrong. I could probably never live in San Francisco. Yet, I’m always glad to see it, and I was very glad, this day, as the car moved up, moved down, as we saw some real houses, houses which looked as if they contained real people and were happy about it, saw the water and the marvelous bridges, under the cold, old sun. It was very beautiful. I leaned back between Barbara and Pete. I closed my eyes and let myself be carried.

They awakened me. It had only taken a few minutes for me to fall fast asleep. Barbara held my arm as we climbed the stone stairs of her building. We walked straight through the lobby, an ornate one, into the elevator. Pete was bringing up my gear.

Barbara had rented a penthouse, and her wide, wide windows faced the bay. The sun was just going down. Barbara’s place, at least this big room, was off-white, an off-white which the sun made very vivid, with very heavy, very dark blue drapes. It was a very nice room. The sun was very harsh on my face, it felt wonderful. I walked to the window, and stood there.

Barbara came, and took my coat, and then she was very busy behind me, at the closet, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, and then back again to the kitchen. The buzzer sounded and I listened to Barbara’s heels in the uncarpeted passageway and I heard Pete come in. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and the winter sun would soon be going down. I had never watched the sun on the water before, or so it seemed; the wrinkles in the water, like the tinfoil I’d played with as a child, and the sun, like the matches on the tinfoil, and darkening it like that. And it moved the way the tinfoil had moved beneath my hands. But the sound was different. There was a wind on the water, and I could hear it moaning, all the way up here.

Pete came, and stood beside me.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Barbara came to the window. “Leo, there are pajamas and a dressing gown lying on your bed. I suggest that you change into them—right now. Then you can have one drink with us, and, by then, your bath should be ready.” She turned me away from the window. “Take him away, Pete, and make him comfortable, and I’ll make the drinks.”

Pete smiled, and turned into the room with me. “We don’t want you to feel that we’re running the show, baby—”

“Certainly not,” said Barbara. “But we are.”

Well. The only reason people mind being taken care of is that they are taken care of badly, or that the price is too high—it comes to the same thing. But Pete and Barbara loved me. I was very happy to know that. I was happy to know I knew it. For people had loved me, after all, when I had simply not dared to know it, and I had hurt them, and myself, very badly. Beneath Pete’s tone, beneath Barbara’s wry decisiveness, was a very real fear. They had almost lost me, after all. Soon, the continent, and then the ocean, would divide us and then they would not be able to tease me and tyrannize me and take care of me anymore. And I could only show my love for them by submitting to their tyranny, by trying to prove with all my actions that I certainly loved them enough, now, to take care of myself when all they would have would be reports of disasters in the air or on the sea, news of earthquakes here or there, or revolutions here or there, and maps, the sunny or the stormy sky, and the untrustworthy mail. I started toward the bedroom, shedding my jacket and my tie as I went, and Pete helped me to undress and I got into the pajamas and the dressing gown and put on my old slippers.

There was a fire in the fireplace and Barbara had pulled the sofa up close to it, and piled it high with cushions. I sank down into all this, feeling rather like a pasha. Barbara came in, and handed the drinks around. She sat down on a big hassock near the fireplace, and lit a cigarette.

“Look,” she said, after a moment, “do you really think it’s wise to take off on such a long trip so soon—you know, and alone? Mightn’t it be better to stay here just a few more days?”

“Me and Barbara could take care of you,” said Pete. “We’ll take turns making nourishing little broths for you, and all”—he laughed—“and you can stay in my pad because the papers will just bug you and Barbara to death if they know you’re staying here.” He watched me. “Because you are still very tired, man. I don’t think you realize how tired you are.”

“You aren’t on any schedule,” Barbara said. “You haven’t got to be anywhere at any particular time. I’d think of that as a luxury, if I were you, and make the most of it.”

I watched the fire. I was trying to find out what I really wanted to do. It was complicated by the fact that, at the moment, I really wanted to do nothing—just sit by the fire like this, with my friends, in safety. I would not be safe once I walked out of here. I would be a target again. I was tired, that was true, tired, above all, perhaps, of being a target; tired of making decisions, tired of being responsible. And for a while, they were saying, and they knew it could only be for a short while, I would not have to do that: they would do for me whatever had to be done, and I could catch my breath, and rest. But I knew that I dreaded seeing Caleb and his wife and his two children, and I dreaded seeing my father, and I dreaded seeing New York. Should I put it all off, or should I get it over with?

Is it necessary, Leo, I asked myself, to think about it in quite such a melodramatic, beleaguered way? Don’t sweat it. If you’re tired, rest.

“What you say makes sense. I just thought that as long as I was going, I might as well go.”

“But you’re not running a race,” said Barbara. “Get there when you get there—get there in easy stages.”

“It doesn’t matter when you get to France,” Pete said. “You can have the house as long as you want it. And Barry’s housekeeper doesn’t care when you get there. In fact, the longer you take, the better she’ll like it.”

“You’ve got a point there,” I said, and smiled and sipped my drink.

“I just don’t want you to get too tired,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t mind so much maybe if someone were going with you—but—and New York’s going to be a terrible strain.” She tapped her foot, and looked at Pete. “As a matter of fact, we almost sent for Christopher to come out here and take you back. He’s a very good bodyguard, Christopher, almost as good as Pete,” and she smiled. “Frankly, I still think that’s a good idea.”

Pete backed her up at once. “I do, too,” he said, “and why don’t we do that? Let’s say it takes him a couple of days to get out here, well, you can lie around my pad and read and play records, do whatever you want to do, take the car and wander around the city—you know—and then when he comes, he could have a couple of days investigating all the city’s dives and making out with all the black broads and sounding out all the black revolutionaries”—he grinned—“be good for him. And then we’d put you both on a plane, and I’d feel a whole lot better, man, because we don’t want you fooling around with your luggage and all them simple-minded people and Mr. and Mrs. Ass-kisser on the fucking plane who will already have worn you out, baby, before the plane gets off the ground good.”

“But if Christopher’s on that plane,” said Barbara, “the autograph-hunting housewives from Des Moines will stay far away, believe me.”

“They’ll think Christopher was sent by the Mau Mau,” Pete said.

“He certainly looks it—hell,” I said, “I think he was,” and we laughed.

“And you see,” said Barbara, “that will give Mr. and Mrs. Ass-kisser such a thrill that your box office will climb astronomically. One must think of these things.”

I laughed. “You’re very persuasive.” I leaned back in the cushions—what is it about a fire which makes one feel so safe? “And you might be right. Let me think about it.”

“Well,” said Pete, “if your brother’s meeting you tomorrow, you ain’t got too long to be thinking—we have to let him know.”

“And let Christopher know,” said Barbara.

I had no practical arguments. Anyway, I was too tired to argue. I didn’t want to leave this fire, or this room, but I wanted to get out of the country. I had had it among all these deadly and dangerous people, who made their own lives, and all the lives they touched, so flat and stale and joyless. Once, I had thought a day would come when I would be able to get along with them—and indeed the day had come: I got along with them by keeping them far from me. I didn’t have anything against them, particularly; or I had so much against them that the bill could now never be tallied, and so had become irrelevant. My countrymen impressed me, simply, as being, on the whole, the emptiest and most unattractive people in the world. It seemed a great waste of one’s only lifetime to be condemned to their chattering, vicious, pathetic, hysterically dishonest company. There were other things to do, other people to see, there was another way to live! I had seen it, after all, and I knew. But I also knew that what I had seen, I had seen from a distance, a distance determined by my history. I was part of these people, no matter how bitterly I judged them. I would never be able to leave this country. I could only leave it briefly, like a drowning man coming up for air. I had the choice of perishing with these doomed people, or of fleeing them, denying them, and, in that effort, perishing. It was a very cunning trap, and a very bitter joke. For these people would not change, they could not, they had no energy for change: the very word caused their eyes to unfocus, their lips to loosen or to tighten, and sent them scurrying into their various bomb-shelters. And, therefore, I was really rather reluctant to see Christopher, whose destiny was as tied to this desolation as my own, but who felt that his options and his possibilities were different. Indeed, they were, they had to be: but what they were was not to be deciphered by staring into America’s great stone face. I was nearly twenty years older than Christopher, and it made me ashamed, very often, listening to him, watching him, understanding the terrible round of his days, that not all of my endeavor, not all of the endeavor of so many for so long, had lessened his danger in any degree, or in any way at all sweetened the bitter cup. And, since I was so much older than Christopher, I knew far better than Christopher could how little warrant I had for agreeing that his options and possibilities were different. I had to agree because I loved him and valued him. I had to agree because it is criminal to counsel despair. I had to agree because it is always possible that if one man can be saved, a multitude can be saved. But, in fact, it seemed to me that Christopher’s options and possibilities could change only when the actual framework changed: and the metamorphosis of the framework into which we had been born would almost certainly be so violent as to blow Christopher, and me, and all of us, away. And then—how does the Bible put it? Caleb would know—perhaps God would raise up a people who could understand. But, God’s batting average failing to inspire confidence, I committed myself to Christopher’s possibilities. Perhaps God would join us later, when He was convinced that we were on the winning side. Then, heaven would pass a civil-rights bill and all of the angels would be equal and all God’s children have shoes.

I knew that I was being coy, a little dishonest, more than a little frightened: “Are you sure,” I asked, “that Christopher would want to come all the way out here—just for a couple of days?”

“Shoot,” said Pete, sucking his teeth authoritatively, “he’d have been here already, if he’d had any bread.”

Barbara nodded, and sipped her drink, watching me. I wondered if I was worried about seeing Barbara and Christopher together again—life can be a bitch sometimes. She knew, I think, that I was wondering this. She waited, and I said, finally, “Well, all right, if you think that’s best—you’ve sort of got me over a barrel.”

But I couldn’t help smiling as I said it, and Pete and Barbara smiled and bowed to each other and raised their glasses in triumph. Then Barbara came over, and kissed me.

“Now, tell the truth. That wasn’t hard, was it? And aren’t you—just a little bit—relieved?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Just a little bit. But your triumph’s going to cost you something, princess. I want another drink.”

She took my glass. “All right. But, then, you will take your bath, won’t you? Because I’ve ordered dinner to be sent up in about an hour or so—a nice dinner, all the things you like, and it’d be a pity to eat it cold.” She went to the bar, and poured my drink.

“You see, Barbara,” Pete said. “I told you we should just have gone ahead and sent for the cat.”

“Oh, but this way, we’re sure to have Leo around for at least a couple more days. After all, how do we know how long it will take Christopher to get here?” She winked at Pete, and laughed, and came back and put my drink in my hand.

“I wonder if I could have a cigarette?” I asked.

“You can have one cigarette now,” said Barbara, “and one cigarette after dinner and that’s all. That’s serious. And when you go away from here, you really must make an effort about that—you’re going to have to watch your drinking, you know that, but cigarettes are really worse.” She watched me, both worried and stern. “Really.” She lit a cigarette and put it between my lips. “There. Don’t say I never give you nothing.”

I inhaled the cigarette, which tasted strange, almost as strange as cigarettes had tasted when I was a kid, just learning to smoke. I looked at it, and gave it back to Barbara.

I said, “Maybe I’ll try it again after dinner.” I sipped my drink, then I put it on the table. I stared into the fire.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to them. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. I wanted to talk, I had much to say. But, whereas they might have known what I was going to say, I didn’t: and so I stared into the fire. They talked to each other, unconsciously dropping their voices a little: and I stared into the fire. They were talking backstage shoptalk and gossip for awhile, laughing a lot. I was aware of Pete’s rather brown teeth in his brown and Oriental face, and of Barbara’s very clear laughter sounding the way running water looks, over stones. It was nice to hear them. It made me feel safe. I knew they didn’t care whether I talked or not. They were glad—they were proud, even—that I could stare into the fire, that I was free to stare into the fire.

And what did the fire say? Now that I knew that I was going to live, at least for awhile, the fire seemed warmer than it ever had before. I sipped my drink, watching that crumbling, shaking, brilliant universe. The fire towered high, rising straight up, like a tree or tower—a tower made of air, lifting itself ever higher, vain even in its fall, and glorious. Not for two seconds together did the fire remain the same. It could not be content until everything had come under its dominion, had served its lust, and become a part of itself. I thought of martyrs, saints, and witches perishing in the fire, while multitudes looked on and felt that they were, thus, purified by flame. The man who stole the fire had bequeathed us the instrument of our salvation; and we, like the fire, were never the same for two seconds together, and, like the fire, we had never changed. How had they felt, those who had been destined to make our purity inviolate, when brought chained to the place and tied to the stake or the ladder, watching the faces of their brothers as they piled the fire higher, watching those faces until the smoke and the fire and the anguish intervened, until the sinful flesh had paid its penalty and the multitude were once again redeemed? What a tremendous decision had been made, what a mighty law had been passed, so long ago, and with the roar of universal relief and approval: that only the destruction of another could bring peace to the soul and guarantee the order of the universe! The fire said, in Caleb’s voice, Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of? I wondered why it was a virtue, often presented as the highest, to despise oneself and everybody else. What a slimy gang of creeps and cowards those old church fathers must have been; and remained; and what was my brother doing in that company? Where else should a man’s breath be, Caleb, I asked, but in his nostrils? Have you forgotten, have you forgotten, the flesh of our fathers which burned in that fire, the bones of our men broken by that wrath, the privacy of our women made foul by that conquest, and our children turned into orphans, into less than dogs, by that universal righteousness? Oh, yes, yes, yes, forgive them, let them rot, let them live or die; but how can you stand in the company of our murderers, how can you kiss that monstrous cross, how can you kiss them with the kiss of love? How can you? I asked of Caleb, who moaned and thundered at me from the fire. I had not talked to Caleb for years, for many years had cultivated an inability to think of him. But, soon I would be seeing him and his wife and his children. Me, but lately ensnared by death, I returned to my brother, I longed for him. I needed him: but the fire raged between us.

I heard Barbara saying, from a long way off, “Well, of course, part of Amy’s trouble is that she’s really a quite decent little actress—really, one of the best young actresses I’ve ever worked with. But Bob can’t direct her—you know, he never really did direct her. So, of course she’s never really felt secure and that can make everyone else very nervous. But I don’t think Amy’s the one to blame. Sylvia’s wrong about that.”

“Oh, well. Sylvia. She’s just afraid that the child messes up that one kind of shitty sentimental scene they have together.”

“Amy isn’t good in that scene, that’s true. But it’s because she’s afraid of Sylvia. And that’s because Bob was afraid of Sylvia. He was so afraid she’d curse him out that he just let her have her way. And so what else can poor Amy do but just sort of stand there, plotting to get out of that corner where nobody can see her or hear her, where Sylvia always traps her?”

Pete laughed. “Well, Sylvia’s been playing maids and clowns for about forty-five years, yukking and shucking and bowing mighty low. Now, at least, she’s out of the kitchen—so you know she’s going to make the most of it.”

“She doesn’t, though. The scene would go much better if she’d get up off of Amy, and let her work. And if the scene went the way it should go, then Sylvia would show to much better advantage, too.”

“Well—you tell that to our black prima donna.”

“Oh, no. Not I. She’d never listen to anything coming from me. I’ve tried to give Amy a few pointers, but it hasn’t helped much. Anyway, thank God, the tour’s almost over.” She looked over at me. “Are you ready for your bath?”

“Aren’t you two going to the theater?”

“We’re dark tonight. We wouldn’t arrange to take you out of the hospital on a night when we’re working.”

That made sense, and I would certainly have thought of it if I hadn’t been off schedule so long and so forgotten what the schedule was.

“Pete,” I said, “when I got sick, did my brother start to come out here?”

“Well,” Pete said—he looked uncomfortable—“I don’t know if I did right, but this is what I did. I knew the wire services had picked it up right away, and so I called New York—luckily, Barbara had his home phone number. So I called his house and I got his wife. He wasn’t there, he was at the church. So I told her you was resting easy and out of danger but you had to rest for awhile and we was taking the best possible care of you we could and I told her not to worry. She sounded relieved and she thanked me and she gave me the number of the church and I called the church.” He paused.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah. I talked to him. He was busy running some kind of Youth Drive, I never did figure out what he meant by that, but he sounded worried about you and I told him you would be all right. And then he wanted to know if you wanted him to come out here. He had to let me know that it would be a real sacrifice for him and for the church, but he’d do it for you because you were his brother. Well”—Pete grimaced—“I didn’t really go for that sacrifice shit too much, and I didn’t think you would, either. But you were in no condition for me to be asking you questions and so I told him, No, not now, and I’d be in touch with him and that was that.”

The silence in the room was a little loud. Pete watched me with a smile, Barbara poked the fire. “I just realized,” I said, “that he hasn’t written to me at all. I haven’t heard a word from him.” I finished my drink, and stood up. “How come he’s meeting me at the plane?”

“He called up and asked when you were coming and we thought we had to tell him and then he said he’d meet you at the plane.” He watched me, wry, mocking, with a deep, distant sympathy. “That’s it, old buddy. Now you know as much as I do.”

I looked from Pete to Barbara. “I doubt that,” I said.

“He did say,” said Pete maliciously, “that he was leaving you in the hands of the Lord.”

So that’s where he left me, I thought. I laughed. “None of you mothers could have done as much. I hope you thanked him.”

“I said I was sure you’d be glad to know we heard from him.” He grinned. “And that we was waiting on the Lord.”

I laughed again. “Well. I must go wash.” Whiter than snow! I thought, and I walked into the bathroom. The bath was full of bubbles, big and blue. I lowered myself into the water. It licked up around me, as hungry as fire, around my private parts, my belly, my nipples, my chest. I leaned back, I put my head under, I came back up. I put my hands to my soaked, woolly head, like a savage newly baptized. Whiter than snow. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. My Jesus is a rock in a weary land, and all my sins are taken away.

“Get away, Jordan. I’ve got to cross over to see my Lord.”

They sang that song at my mother’s funeral. That funeral was a great revelation. She died when I was twenty-six. By that time, I had worked professionally as an actor and whenever I was working as an actor, I was an actor. But at the time she died, I was a cook in a barbecue joint. She died, worried about me, I knew. I wasn’t getting along with the family, and I wasn’t getting on in the world. She had met Barbara two or three times; once, when I took her to see Barbara backstage; once, when I brought Barbara to the house; one other time, not long after the Paradise Alley days. I had thought that she would like Barbara, that Barbara would somehow prove to her the helpless depth of my ambition. But, whereas my father, without particularly liking or disliking Barbara, worried about the griefs and dangers she could bring me to, and Caleb kept her carefully quarantined in the limbo of unregenerate harlots—unregenerate because she was white, harlot because she was a woman, in limbo because she was both—my mother hated Barbara, hated her helplessly, depthlessly, felt for Barbara a revulsion so deep that she could scarcely bear to look at her. And she attempted to cover this with a New Orleans gentility which we, her family, had never known her to use before, and which was far more devastating than cursing or spittle or a blow. What made it unbearable was that it revealed a fear I had never noticed in my mother before. “Now, you know,” she said to me darkly, once, “that is not what I raised you for. That was no part of my calculations, young man, and you might as well know it front as back.”

“What are you talking about, Mama?” I knew what she was talking about. She could almost never bring herself to mention Barbara by name, but the tone was unmistakable.

“I mean, I am not going to have no fair-haired, blue-eyed baby crawling around here and calling me Grandmama. That’s what I mean. You know damn well what I mean.”

I sighed. We were sitting alone in the house. Maybe it was a Saturday. I said, “Mama, what are you getting yourself upset about? Have I said I was going to marry the girl?”

“You might. You might—you just that foolish. And then what’s going to happen to you I don’t know—with a common little thing like that?” She laughed, a coarse, sad, unpleasant sound. “Ha! I sure didn’t raise you for that.”

I knew, as I said it, that I was making a mistake. “Mama, what makes you call her common? She comes from a very rich Kentucky family, and she’s their only child.”

She laughed again. “Is that so? And what does she do with her money? Spend it on you?” She looked me cruelly up and down. I certainly didn’t look as though anybody spent money on me. “Yeah. I reckon that’s where you got all them fine clothes you’re wearing, from Bonwit Teller’s.”

She had hurt me. People can, mothers can. I said, “All right, Mama. Have it your way. Barbara’s a whore and I’m her pimp.”

“Well, at least,” she shouted, then—for now I had hurt her—“That would make some kind of sense. At least she’d be some use to you! And you wouldn’t be walking around here in the wintertime, skinny as Job’s mule and with that little piece of rag you got the nerve to call a coat and wearing sneakers—in the wintertime! What’s going to happen to you, you fool? Is that girl addled your brains for fair?” I turned away, and she continued in another tone, a tone harder to bear: “I thought you was going to make something of yourself. We all thought so, Caleb thought so—we used to be so proud of you! And look at you. Just look at you.”

“I guess you think Caleb’s made something of himself,” I said, “and you want me to be like my big brother.”

“Caleb is a respected man. A very respected man. I used to worry about Caleb—I used to worry about Caleb more than I worried about you. But, yes, Caleb has made something of himself, and he made it out of nothing and you know it was hard for him, it was hard! But look at what he’s done—now it won’t be too long before he owns his own home—”

“Yeah. With all those nickels and dimes he steals from all these ignorant niggers! You’re proud of that? You raised me for that?”

“Don’t you talk about your brother that way! You’ve got no right to talk! What have you got? Tell me that. Huh? You ain’t got a goddamn pot to piss in. And where do you live, huh? Tell me that. And where do you steal your money? Huh? You want to tell me that?” She watched me. “Don’t you come around here, being all self-righteous and haughty. Your brother’s made a man of himself. But don’t nobody know what you is yet.”

I picked up the rag I called a coat. “All right. I’m not a man. I’ll never be a man. Forget it. I’m getting out of here.”

“Now, where you think you going? You just got here. Your daddy’ll be home in a few minutes—”

“Yeah. And my big brother and his big-assed wife and their two-headed baby. Tell them little Leo’s been here and gone.”

“Leo! You come back here!”

“I will not come back here! I’m going to see my whore!”

“Leo! Oh, Leo. What’s happened to you? Why can’t you be the Leo you used to be?”

“I will not ever again,” I shouted, “be the Leo I used to be! Fuck the Leo I used to be. That boy is dead. Dead.” And out of the door and down the steps I went.

What a pity. What a waste. I knew, when my mother went on like that, when my mother hurt me, that she was not trying to hurt me. I knew that. And yet—I was hurt. I was frightened—perhaps because I then considered that I was too old to be hurt, especially by my mother. I did not know—then—what nerve was unbearably struck in my mother by the conjunction of Barbara and myself. I wish I had known. But one of the reasons I was so vulnerable—in those days, in those ways—was my unspoken and unspeakable shame and fury concerning my career. I had, indeed, appeared on the professional stage, oh, four or five times, and worked with little theaters all up and down the goddamn country. I still choke on the dust of those halls, will never really recover from the stink and chill of those rooms. And, my God, the roles I played! Roles—roles is much to say. I made my first professional stage appearance, inevitably, carrying a tray. I was on for about a minute, and I had to carry the tray over to some fucked-up, broken-down British fagot, who was one of the great lights of the theater. I had to serve this zombie his breakfast about five hundred fucking times, and every single time I went upstage to uncover his eggs and pour his coffee, Britannia came up behind me and lovingly stroked my balls. Nobody could see it, because he had this wide velvet robe stretched out behind him; but if he had done it in sight of the entire audience, I don’t think anybody would have noticed it, or cared; people won’t see what they can’t afford to see. Well, I took it as long as I could—the point is, I took it too long: and I did it, as I kept saying to myself, because I was being exposed—indeed, I was—and it was a Broadway show, and it would look good in my résumé. The end between me and Britannia—and the show—came during a matinée when I reached behind me a second before he reached and pulled on his balls like I was Quasimodo ringing the bells of Notre Dame. The mother couldn’t make a move and he was supposed to be downstage to greet Lady Cunt-face who had just fluttered in; and by the time I let him go, and he stumbled downstage, he looked like a teakettle about to whistle. Well. It went on like that, and it got worse, and I don’t think I’d have minded if I could have found a role which had some relation to the life I lived, the life I knew, some role which did not traduce entirely my own sense of life, of my own life. But I played waiters, butlers, porters, clowns; since they had never existed in life, there was no conceivable way to play them. And one learned, therefore, and long before one had learned anything else, the most abject reliance on the most shameful tricks, one learned before one learned anything else that contempt for the audience which is death to art. One was imitating an artifact, one might as well have been an icon, and one’s performance depended not at all on what one saw—still less, God forbid, on what one felt—but on what the audience had come to see, had been trained to see. In the most sinister possible way, and, at the same time, the most fearful, they needed to know that you were happy in order to be sure that they were happy. The hidden, hopeful weight in the balance could be one thing only, one’s charm. By that I do not at all mean the ability to be ingratiating, but the far more difficult ability—or necessity—of somehow thinking oneself and the audience beyond the confines of the expected. One had to change the beat: one had to find a rhythm which arrested the rhythm. And the price for this was a certain ruthless good humor, for the audience had, after all, placed themselves in your hands by lacking the courage to imagine about you what you knew too well about them. The people saw you showing your teeth: it escaped their notice that they were also showing theirs—and showing them, furthermore, on the cue delivered by their Fool.

But if porters, clowns, and butlers were a big fat drag, those more sympathetic efforts made by the American theater were infinitely more demoralizing. I actually did play, for example, In Abraham’s Bosom, once, in one of those little church theaters, it may have been in Denver, but it could have been Brooklyn or Birmingham. I was far too young for it, and nothing could have made me either right or ready. I gave an awful performance, and I knew it. I couldn’t find my way into the character at all, I didn’t believe in his sorrows and I didn’t believe in his joys and I found absolutely no way to play the scene in which the hero, having struck down a white man, loudly and sincerely repents. He sounded as though he had struck down the son of God. The white man had beaten him with a whip: why was the nigger supposed to moan because he reacted—and, at that, belatedly—as the dueling codes of Europe assume a man should act? Playing this role, for this was a role, was harder than carrying the tray. It was the tray transformed into a boulder, and the play was the mountain up which I had to roll it—escaping narrowly indeed with my dignity when the curtain fell. The play was put on as part of an educational drive: was this what we were supposed to learn? Father forgive them, Caleb would have said, for they know not what they do. Well, Father could forgive them till times got better. It was too bad they didn’t know what they were doing—I knew what they were doing, and as long as they were doing it to me, I was going to do my best to give them a bloody instruction. But this made my life very hard, for after all, I had no power, and it destroyed in me forever much that wished to remain warm and sweet and open.

By and by, in little experimental theaters here and there, I played some roles written for white men. And this was a curious kind of revelation, too, and it was very unnerving. I knew, in the first place, after all, that no matter how well I played, say, Tom in The Glass Menagerie, or Mio in Winterset, I was never going to be hired to play these parts. To do them at all was very forcefully to be made to realize the nature of the vacuum in which, helplessly, one was spinning. It was very hard to persist in learning what would almost certainly prove to be a useless language. And yet one had to learn, one had to; for how shameful to be judged unready should the great day of one’s opportunity arrive! I liked playing Mio, and I think I was good—after all, I too had a father cruelly wronged—and yet I always felt that there was something in the character that eluded me. I was very young when I played Mio, but playing him made me feel old. It’s hard to explain this. I liked the play very much—liked it more then than I do today—and the role was a beautiful challenge. And yet—I always felt that there was something terribly callow about the boy. It was hard for me not to judge him as being something of a whining boy. He seemed surprised by what had happened; he seemed to feel the heavens should have helped him. I envied him his surprise, I wondered at it, but I myself no longer felt it. The heavens he addressed were blind and cold, no healing there and well I knew it, the fate that overtook him, overtook him, as it were, without even noticing him. The wheel rolled and struck him down and plowed him under—that was all. And, as the years went on, I was to be more and more struck by this numb passivity on the part of characters who, after all, were part of the most active and optimistic nation in the world. They were helpless, they were stricken, from the moment the curtain rose. They seemed unable utterly to suspect any connection between their personal fortunes and the fortunes of the state of which they were a part, and rarely indeed was their heroism anything more than physical. It was not pleasant to be forced to reflect that they operated in a vacuum even greater than mine, and knew even less about themselves than I. I was trying to learn how to work in the theater: it was chilling to suspect that there wasn’t any. Most of the roles played by white people could only be played by means of tricks, tricks which would never help one to come closer to life, and all of which one would have to discard in order to play even one scene from, say, Ibsen.

I was discovering what some American blacks must discover: that the people who destroyed my history had also destroyed their own.

But all of this was long ago. I could not have said any of this then. I was merely in the process of testing my own sensibilities against the given. I knew something about the life I lived. It was not reflected, it was not respected, anywhere. And, therefore, my early years were perhaps more solitary than most, and certainly more embattled, and I was considered by nearly everyone to be a very difficult person.

Nearly everyone: who did I know in those days? Well, Barbara, of course, above all, Barbara. She was certainly having her troubles. She worked more steadily than I. She was then trapped in precocious teenage roles, which she hated, but she was doggedly learning, as she put it, how to walk. We both remained members of the Workshop, having learned, with no little difficulty, how to use it for our own purposes. We conducted, from time to time, our own experiments, and reacted with less intensity to Saul’s judgments; but Barbara, on the whole, saw much more of Saul and Lola than I. Oh, there was a boy named Steve. There was a colored girl, named Sally. She was studying at NYU, and we were very close for awhile. But, at the point at which, in the ordinary way, we should have married, we parted; for I knew I could not marry. I was in a bizarre situation in those days, for there were not a great many Negroes in the world in which I moved—I hadn’t planned it that way, God knows, and I didn’t want it that way, but that’s the way it was—and there were virtually no Negro girls at all. So, I was lonely, in a very particular and a very dangerous way. I might have been different—those years might have been different—if I had not been estranged from my family. But I was, and this was mainly because of Caleb.

For some reason, my first memory of Caleb, after the war was over, connects with another memory, of Barbara and myself; and I find it impossible to tell the one without first telling the other. I don’t know why. I did not refuse to join the Army, but outwitted it by a particular species of ruthless cunning. I was—I say now—prepared to go to jail. The Japanese had already been interned. I was not going to fight for the people who had interned them, who had also destroyed the Indians, who were in the process of destroying everyone I loved: I was not going to defend my murderers. Yet, when my moment came, I did not say any of that. I arrived at the Harlem draft-board with several books under my arm. I deliberately arrived a little late. I pretended that I had just come from the library. I said that I was the only support of my aging parents, and, in fact, I had had the foresight to be working in a shipyard, foresight or luck, it’s hard to say now, I’ve held so many jobs for so many reasons. Anyway, I think I gave a great performance before my draft-board. It was composed, as I knew it would be, of round, brown, respectable old men who had long ago given up any hope of being surprised. Round, brown, respectable old men, whose only real desire, insofar as they still dared desire, was to be white. I knew that, and with my books under my arm, with one brother already in the Army, with two aging people at home, with my impeccable shipyard job, with my flaming youth, and what I could not then have named as a deadly single-mindedness—and using precisely the fact that I was physically improbable—persuaded these round, brown, respectable old men that my potential value to my race—to them; my very improbability contained their hope of power, and I knew that—was infinitely more important than my, after all, trivial value to my country. And they deferred me. I had known that they would: that if I pressed the right buttons, they would have no choice but to defer me. And they checked up on me from time to time, but they never bothered me. I had surprised them, and they were grateful, although some of them grew to hate me later, when they suspected how they had goofed. But then it was too late: I was on my height, in my dungeon, had entered, as we say, my bag.

Anyway: during the Workshop summer, just after Jerry went away, Barbara and I took it into our heads to climb the mountain which overlooked Bull Dog Road. We decided to climb it, and spend the night there. One of the reasons, though we didn’t say it, was that we were having a hard time in that house, now that Jerry had left it. We hadn’t yet begun to have a terrible time with each other, merely—that was to come; with Jerry gone, we were a scandal. Our dirty secret was out. For years to come, Barbara and I were to encounter people who spoke with the most chilling authority concerning our three-way, black-white arrangement on Bull Dog Road. Jerry was considered, of course, to be the victim of our cruel and deliberate perversity, though Jerry himself never said anything of the kind, and I am sure he never felt that. Dealing with the townspeople was very, very hard, and we avoided them as much as possible. Barbara did most of our shopping, for example, usually alone—though sometimes with a couple of the Workshop kids—enduring the muttering, the jibes, the lewd chuckles, the sly nudges, the outright insults. I continued to pose for my ladies, but no other odd jobs were ever offered me, once Jerry had left, and we were having a hard time making ends meet. Some guys jumped me one night when I was coming home from the theater, blacking both eyes, and bloodying my nose. We sometimes sat in our house in the evening as though we were waiting for the mob to come and carry us away. Some nights, the entire town was in the house with us, and we tried to ignore them and concentrate on each other.

I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, that we could not succeed. Of all the fears there are, perhaps the fear of physical pain and destruction is the most devastating. For I had to admit to myself that I was simply, ignobly, and abjectly afraid. I didn’t like the taste of my own blood. I didn’t want all my teeth knocked out, didn’t want my nose smashed, my eyes blinded, didn’t want my skull caved in. To drive to town, to walk about, to get through a single day, demanded at least as much energy as would have been demanded for a fifteen-round fight. More: for a fifteen-round fight supposed a winner and a loser, supposed a resolution, and, hence, a release. But there was no release for me, and especially not where it should most certainly have been found, in Barbara’s arms, in bed. Fear and love cannot long remain in the same bed together. And how many nights I lay there, while Barbara slept, filled with an indescribable bewilderment; feeling that all that held me to life was being gnawed away, and feeling myself sink, like a weighted corpse, deeper and deeper in the sea of uncertainty. It’s hard, after all, for a boy to find out who he is, or what he wants, if he is always afraid and always acting, and especially when this fear invades his most private life. Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough—alone, we were doomed. We had only each other, and this fact menaced our relation to each other. We had no relief, we had no one to talk to—far behind us were the days when we had played at being lovers, and laughed at how easily the world was shocked. We were not playing now, and neither was the world. Even in the pizza joint they now reacted to us nervously, and we stopped going there. Matthew had left town, we never saw Fowler again; I did not go to the Negro part of town anymore. Some of the Workshop kids were nice, but bafflement on their part and pride on mine kept a great distance between us. And the Workshop brass were cold. Apart from Rags and Madeleine, they simply ignored our relationship, ignored it with a condescending charity, treating us as though we had contracted some loathsome disease, which we couldn’t help. As for Rags, she once volunteered some motherly advice concerning Barbara’s destructiveness, and offered to send me to a psychiatrist. Madeleine was hurt and jealous, tried hard to understand, but couldn’t avoid realizing that she had been badly used—and she had been. She did not exactly stop speaking to us, but discovered that she had nothing to say, and, after the fiasco of To Quito and Back, returned to New York. And I was a little sorry to see her go. I liked her, and we had had fun together. And, while I knew that having fun wasn’t enough, I resented Barbara a little for having forced my hand so soon.

We started out a little late the day we climbed the mountain, and the sun began going down when we were a little more than halfway up. I was pushing us hard, not only because of the sun, but because I was terribly afraid that people might realize that we intended to spend the night on the mountain and follow us up and kill us. We hadn’t driven through town, but had taken the long back road which led to the foot of the mountain. I had parked the car there, off the road, in a clump of trees. No one had seen us, as far as I could tell, except a couple of the ladies in the old ladies’ home. This old ladies’ home sat in the clearing at the foot of the mountain, and the old ladies sat on the deeply shaded veranda, flashing their silver spectacles and their silver hair. Two of them had watched Barbara and me, as we disappeared up the trail. But everyone else, hopefully, would suppose us to be at home.

In spite of everything, we were very happy in the August sun, toiling up the trail. I’m small, but Barbara’s smaller, and I am very strong. I was leading Barbara by the hand. The sleeping bag was on my back, and Barbara had the knapsack.

“Let’s stop a minute. It’s hot.”

“Barbara, there are snakes all over this place. If we stop now, we’ll never make it up. Come on, now!”

I was being Spencer Tracy, in Northwest Passage.

She was just being Barbara, who was afraid of snakes. “Shit,” she murmured, exasperated—but we kept moving upward, toward the retreating, cooling sun, which had nevertheless set everything around us on fire. Except for our breathing, and the breaking of twigs beneath our feet from time to time, it was very silent. Barbara was a good walker; we moved together like two soldiers. On either side of us, as we climbed, were the green, dark woods, hiding everything, hiding the height, hiding the snakes—there really were snakes—and becoming darker, it seemed, with every instant. The path was very narrow, so narrow that we had to walk single file; and very steep; sweat was pouring down my neck and down my back, seeming to soak into the sleeping bag, and making it heavier. A narrow strip of sky was directly over us, ahead of us was only the path, with sunlight splashing down erratically here and there. The path became steeper and then began to level off, the trees became more sparse, and then more individual—they began to look as though they’d had a hard time growing—and then we saw before us, above us, the gothic shape of the abandoned hotel someone had begun building on this mountain long ago. There were many stories about this hotel. Some mad financier had begun it and then lost all his money; the commune had never built a road. And there the hotel stood, a stone structure as gnarled as the trees, with great holes where windows had been. There was a large courtyard with a stone wall and the memory of a driveway and stone steps leading up to the aperture which had been the front door. This led into a high vault which had been intended as a lobby. In this space were stone steps leading up to the unfinished and unsafe second story, and stone steps leading down into the basement. There was a reception counter, the only detail which caused one to think of a hotel. There had, apparently, been other fixtures; but everything that could be moved had been carted away long ago. Some of the townspeople were earnestly discussing the possibility of tearing down the building and turning the stones to profit. But their ingenuity had not yet defeated the many practical difficulties this plan entailed.

It did not look hospitable as we approached, with the light now failing fast, and the night sounds beginning. “God,” said Barbara, “wouldn’t it be awful if some other people had the same idea as we did—of spending the night here, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind seeing a friendly face.” And, because I, too, was uneasy, I sang out, “Hello! You got visitors! Is there anybody here?”

My voice echoed and echoed, crashing through the trees, sounding in the valley, and returning to us.

I said, “Nobody here, I guess.” I dropped the sleeping bag in the middle of the courtyard, and Barbara put down the knapsack. I took Barbara’s hand. “Come on.” We walked into the lobby. I switched on the flashlight, and there was a scurrying in the darkness. “Rats. I wonder if they’ve got bats, too.”

“Oh, Leo. You stop that.”

I laughed, and trained the flashlight on the steps leading up. “Let’s see what’s upstairs.”

Hand in hand, like children in a fairy tale, we started up the steps. We walked close to the wall, for there wasn’t any railing—there had been one, of mahogany, but it had been hijacked. At the top of the steps, there stretched before us a high, wide space. I turned the flashlight on the floor, which was wooden. There was a hole in the floor, to our right. The solid part of the floor was covered with all kinds of debris—old paper bags, paper cups; and facing us was a space in the wall which had been a window; and it gave onto a flagged terrace. We tiptoed across the floor, worried about whether or not it would bear our weight, and stepped onto the terrace.

The mad financier had not been so very mad, after all, for when one stepped onto his terrace, one understood his dream. The terrace faced the valley which dropped before us, straight down to the river. The trees were blue and brown, purple and black. In the daytime, the houses and barns were red and white and green and brown. Now, the sun had turned them all into a color somewhere between gold and scarlet. We stood on the terrace, hearing no sound, and making no sound. The far-off river was as still as a great, polished copper plate.

“If this had been mine,” said Barbara, at last, “I would never have dreamed of making a hotel out of it. I’d have kept it to myself.”

“Perhaps he was lonely,” I said, “and he wanted people to share this with him.”

“It really would have made a marvelous hotel,” said Barbara, after a moment. “He was right about that. Poor man. He must have spent a fortune. I hope he didn’t break his heart.”

“I’ll go get the whiskey,” I said, “and we can have a drink up here.”

I turned back into the dark house, and went down the steps and across the vault, into the courtyard, and picked up the knapsack. I came back to Barbara, who was sitting on the terrace, with her chin on her knees.

“And what are you thinking, princess?”

“I was thinking—that—it’s nice to be here. With you.”

“We’re going to make it all right,” I said, and I opened the whiskey and I poured some into two paper cups. I gave one to her and I sat down next to her. We touched cups. We sat and watched the sky and the valley change colors. Slowly, and yet not slowly, the sun entirely left the sky—the streaks of fire and gold vanished. The sky turned mother of pearl and then heavy, heavy silver. In the silver, faint stars gleamed, faint and pale, like wanderers arriving; and the pale moon appeared, like a guide or a schoolmistress, to assign the stars their places. The stars grew bolder as the moon rose, and the sky became blue-black. The trees, the houses, the barns were shapes of darkness now. The valley could not be seen. But, far away, beneath us, the river reflected the moon. They were in communion with each other. Barbara put her head on my shoulder. We had another drink. We looked into each other’s eyes, briefly, and moved closer together. We listened to the night sounds, wings beating dimly around us, the electrical whirring of insects, the cry of an owl, the barking of a dog. Lights appeared in the valley, here and there. The lights of a single boat glowed on the river. There were no human sounds at all. We were alone, at peace, on high.

“What shall we do when the summer’s over, Leo?”

“Why—we’ll go back to the city. What were you thinking of doing?”

“Shall we go back to Paradise Alley?”

“God. I don’t know. I’ve got to get some kind of job—you know.”

“Yes. So must I.”

“I’ll probably get a job as a waiter. So I can eat till I get paid.”

“Except that those jobs always take away your appetite.”

“That’s true. It’s pretty hard to make your living watching the human race eat.”

“Well,” she said carefully, “we ought to be able to work it out all right.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out fine.” Then I kissed her. “Tell me when you’re hungry and I’ll make a fire.”

“In a little while,” she said, and she leaned against me again.

I don’t know what she was seeing as we looked out over the dark valley; but I did not see any future for us; I did not see any future for myself at all. Barbara was young and talented and pretty, and single-minded. There was nothing to prevent her from scaling the heights. Her eminence was but a matter of time. And what could she then do with her sad, dark lover, a boy trapped in the wrong time, the wrong place, and with the wrong ambitions trapped in the wrong skin? If I stood in her way, she would certainly grow to hate me, and quite rightly. But I had no intention of standing in her way. The most subtle and perhaps the most deadly of alienations is that which is produced by the fear of being alienated. Because I was certain that Barbara could not stay with me, I dared not be committed to Barbara. This fear obscured a great many fears, but it obscured, above all, the question of whether or not I wished to be committed to Barbara, or to anyone else, and it hid the question of whether or not I was capable of commitment. But these questions were hidden from me then, much as the shape of the valley was hidden. I knew that I had to make my way—somehow. No one could help me and I could not call for help. There was no way for me to know if the fear I sometimes felt when with Barbara, a fear which sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, which sometimes made me catch my breath when walking the streets at noon, was a personal fear, produced merely by the convolutions of my own personality, or a public fear, produced by the rage of others. I could not read my symptoms, for I loved her, I knew that, and loved her more than I loved anyone else. We were not always happy, but when I was happy with Barbara I was happier than I had ever been with anyone else. We were at ease with each other, as we were with no one else. And yet, I saw no future for us.

We left the terrace and came downstairs to the courtyard, and I built a fire. Our fire, then, was the only light for miles around. We roasted the yams I had found, and grilled our hamburgers; and we had a small bottle of Chianti. As the night grew darker, we began to feel safer, for no one would attempt that mountain trail at night. Barbara leaned back in my arms, and I sang to her.

It takes a worried man

To sing a worried song,

I’m worried now,

But I won’t be worried long,

I sang, and,

I just got a cabin,

You don’t need my cabin,

River, stay ’way from my door,

and,

I hate to see that evening sun go down.

“You’ve got a nice voice,” Barbara said. “You ought to work at it. I bet that’s how you’ll get your break.”

“It’s just an ordinary voice. What do you mean, that’s how I’ll get my break?”

“It’s not an ordinary voice. It’s a very haunting voice. If you started singing professionally, you’d attract a lot of attention. Well, look, that’s practically the classic way for a Negro to break into the theater. Look at Paul Robeson.”

“You look at Paul Robeson. Robeson was a football star, he’s one of the greatest singers in the world, and one of the most handsome men in the world, and he’s built like a hero. You think he’s a good model for me?”

“Oh, shut up. You know what I mean.”

“And, with all that, what’s he played? The Emperor Jones and Othello.”

“I didn’t say that you looked like Paul Robeson. I said that your voice is an asset, and you ought to use it. People will hear you, and that means that they’ll see you, and—well, there are other roles besides The Emperor Jones and Othello.”

“There are? You’ve really been scouting around.”

“And you could start this winter. Really, why don’t you? So we’d both be working—”

“You have a job lined up for this winter already?”

“No. But I’ve heard of a couple of things. I was going to go down to the city next week to—to investigate. You know, this is August. The summer’s almost over.”

“I know.” For no reason at all, I thought of Dinah Washington, singing “Blowtop Blues.”

“And I know you’ve been practicing the guitar. And there are places in the Village where you could start out. Oh, you know, there’s that West Indian restaurant. I bet they’d be glad to have you start out there.”

“If they want people to sing West Indian songs, why would they come to me? I’m not West Indian.”

“Oh, Leo, you are too. You’re part West Indian. You’re just putting up objections so I can knock them down. I know you. It’s a damn good idea, and you know it.”

I had thought about it before; I began to think about it again. “Maybe.”

“You could be the singing waiter.” She laughed. “You’d be a tremendous drawing card.”

I thought, It’s true that I have to start somewhere. I said, “I’m not ready to start singing in public yet.”

“But, Leo, the whole point of starting out in a place like that is that you haven’t got to be ready. They’ll think you’re doing it just for fun. But that’s how you’ll learn.”

“And I can just see me, twenty years from now, playing my guitar all over the Bowery.”

“You will not. You’ll use it to get what you want.”

“I’m not always sure that I know what I want.” I held her a little closer and I stared at our little fire.

“I think—sometimes—when a person says that, he just says it because he’s—afraid—that he won’t get what he wants.”

“Maybe. But you know what you want. Don’t you?”

“I know that I want some things I’ll never get.”

“What things?”

She shifted her weight a little. “Oh. You know. The corny things. A husband. A home.” She paused. “Kids.”

“Why can’t you have those things, Barbara?”

“Maybe I don’t want them enough,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.” I felt her watching me. “It’s funny. I haven’t turned out to be the kind of girl I thought I’d be. I’m not yet twenty, and I’ve had, oh, about three affairs and one abortion already. It makes you feel kind of used up. And sometimes I get frightened—oh, well.” She sighed, and shrugged, smiling. “Sing me another song.”

“After what you’ve said, I don’t know what song to sing. Poor Barbara. I don’t make your life any simpler, do I?”

“I’m not complaining. You didn’t make the world.”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.” I looked up at the sky. “Sometimes, you know? I still wonder who did. I wonder what whoever it was was thinking about.”

“He wasn’t,” she said, with an unexpected harshness in her voice, “thinking about you and me.”

“No. What rotten casting,” I said, and we laughed.

“Sing me one more song, please?” she said. “Before we go to sleep.”

I sang,

I don’t know why

There’s no sun up in the sky,

Stormy weather!

Since my gal and I ain’t together,

It’s raining all the time.

We crawled into our sleeping bag at last, and lay there for awhile, watching the fire drop and disperse and die. The stars were very close, and I saw one fall. I made a wish. I wished that Barbara and I, no matter what happened, would always love each other and always be able, without any bitterness, to look each other in the eye. The familiar and yet rather awful heat and pressure rose in my chest and descended to my loins; and I lay there, while the heat wrapped me round, holding Barbara with one arm and feeling her delicate trembling. The heat rose and rose, partly against my will, partly to my delight. For I was beginning to realize that vows were made with the body as sacred as those made with the tongue. And these vows were at once harder to keep, and harder to break. We turned to each other. Everything was still. We began to make love very slowly, more gently and more sorrowfully than we ever had before. We did not say a word. Every caress seemed to drag us up from the depths of ourselves, revealing another nakedness, a nakedness we could scarcely bear. Her face, in the starlight, in the faint light of the embers of our fire, was a face I had never known. I caressed that face, and held it and kissed it, with that passion sometimes produced by memory, the passion of our deepest dreams. I seemed to know, that night, that we were trapped, trapped no matter what we did: we would have to learn to live in the trap. But that night it did not seem impossible. Nothing seemed impossible. Barbara began to moan. It was a black moan, and it was as though, trapped within the flesh I held, there was a black woman moaning, struggling to be free. Perhaps it was because we were beneath the starlight, naked. I had unzipped the sleeping bag, and the August night traveled over my body, as I trembled over Barbara. It was as though we were not only joined to each other, but to the night, the stars, the moon, the sleeping valley, the trees, the earth beneath the stone which was our bed, and the water beneath the earth. With every touch, movement, caress, with every thrust, with every moan and gasp, I came closer to Barbara and closer to myself and closer to something unnameable. And her thighs locked around me, sweeter than water. She held me, held me, held me. And I was very slow. I was very sure. I held it, held it, held it, held it because I knew it could not long be held. All this had nothing to do with time. The moment of our liberation gathered, gathered, crouched, ready to spring, and Barbara sobbed; the wind burned my body, and I felt the unmistakable, the unanswerable retreat, contraction, concentration, the long, poised moment before the long fall. I murmured, Barbara, and seemed to hear her name, my call, ringing through the valley. And her name echoed in the valley for a long time. Then the stars began to grow pale. I zipped the sleeping bag over us. We curled into each other, and slept. We had not spoken.

It was a bright morning. The sun woke us early, and, naked, we dared to wash, and splash each other in the cold stream which trickled near the path. The silver cold water stung us wide awake, and made us proud of our bodies. Naked, I built the fire, and boiled our coffee. Naked and happy, facing each other, we drank it. We became drunk on the sun and the coffee and our nakedness and touched each other’s bodies with a terrible wonder everywhere and we had to make love again. Then, we were covered with sweat, and we washed in the stream again. Then, the sun was high, warning us that the world might be on the way, and we got dressed. I rolled up the sleeping bag, and Barbara packed the knapsack, and we started down. No one was coming up the trail. It was a bright, clear, still morning, and birds were making those sounds we call singing. As we descended, my fear began to return, like the throb of a remembered toothache before the new toothache begins.

As we approached the clearing which held the old ladies’ home, just coming off the trail, now, and walking on level ground, one of the old ladies, silver hair and silver spectacles flashing, stepped down from the porch with astonishing speed and came running toward us, waving a newspaper above her head as though it were a banner. Barbara and I were too astounded even to look at each other. We were both afraid that the lady would fall, and we began to run toward her so that she wouldn’t have to run toward us. But she kept running, just the same. When we reached her, she was out of breath, and she just sat down on the grass. “Look,” she said, “look!”

We were afraid that she was ill, and we simply stared at her.

“Look,” she said again, “look!” With one hand, she pounded the newspaper into the grass. “The war is over. The war is over.”

Then I saw that she had been crying. Some of the other ladies were standing on the porch. We looked down at the newspaper. Well, we understood that the war was over; for a long time, that was all that we understood. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities we had never heard of, had been leveled with single, unprecedented bombs. At first, I only wished that I had paid more attention to mathematics and physics when I had been in high school; what did it mean to split the atom? The old lady kept making sounds between tears and jubilation. I kept thinking, They didn’t drop it on the Germans. The Germans are white. They dropped it on the Japanese. They dropped it on the yellow-bellied Japs. I stared at the old lady. She was still sitting on the grass. She stared up at me, but I knew she wasn’t seeing me. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried. “Isn’t it wonderful? This terrible war is over. Over!”

We helped her to her feet.

“Yes,” said Barbara, terribly pale in the merciless sun, “yes, it’s wonderful that the war is over.”

“Truly wonderful,” I said, parroting Father Divine—I did not know what I was saying.

We began walking the old lady back to the porch. The other old ladies had gathered now, and they, too, were jubilant. But, unlike the first old lady, they were not blind with jubilation. Behind their spectacles, they watched Barbara with a disapproving wonder and they watched me with a profound distrust; they made a sound like dry pebbles on the bed of a vanished stream. Some they loved had died in the war, in this particular war, for they remembered others. Some they loved were coming home. Their hands, their faces, their voices shook, wavered, cracked, climbed. They looked at me from time to time, and they were not unwilling to include me, but they addressed themselves, in the main, to Barbara. Something made them know, somehow, that their day of jubilee might not be mine. And I was base, I must say. I watched them, and I pitied them. I pitied them with a pity not easily distinguished from contempt, which was yet informed by wonder. They were rejoicing. The faith of their fathers—living yet!—had made them victorious over their enemies—had they ever considered me their friend? What was most vague in their consciousness was most precise and alive in mine. But they were old—old ladies rejoicing in the light of the August morning. I felt that they had little enough to rejoice about.

At last we were moving away, waving, smiling to the last. We got into the car. They remained on the porch, and waved as we drove away. Then, Barbara said, with a shudder, “Maybe we better not drive through town. They’ll all be in the streets.”

And so we drove back the way we had come, but we were not left in peace for long. As night was falling, some of the Workshop kids came over, to carry us to the San-Marquands. They were having a Victory Ball.

Caleb had been wounded in the European theater, and they had shipped him home. And, again, my memory here is vague. I talked with Caleb about it only once. He was wounded in the lung, and he very nearly died. He was in a military hospital for a long time, but I know I didn’t see him in the hospital. I can’t remember why. I know my mother and father went down to see him. I remember that they wanted me to come, too, but they couldn’t find me—something like that. I think that I was simply afraid to see Caleb. He had already written us a couple of letters about having found the Lord. When he came back to New York, I don’t know where I was; by the time I saw him, he had already joined The New Dispensation House of God. He told me he was saved. And then I didn’t see him.

Barbara and I came back to New York when the summer ended. We made the mistake—though I don’t know if one can accurately describe as a mistake what one couldn’t help doing—of returning to Paradise Alley. Well, I had a feeling that we should not have gone there: but we had no place else to go. And, at least, we knew Paradise Alley. It was a decrepit slum, and it didn’t matter to the landlord who lived there. We didn’t have the courage to tackle a strange landlord, and I didn’t have any money.

Being back in Paradise Alley meant that we were confronted with the debris of our recent past. Jerry’s socks and shoes, sweatshirts, jockstrap, blue jeans, ties, notes in his handwriting, a photograph of Jerry and Barbara, a photograph of Jerry and Charlie and me—all of us looking historical. There was all my old shit, my winter clothes—by which I mean, principally, sweaters—and heavy shoes, everything referring to a life we had ceased to live. But all of it menaced the life we hoped to live. Silently, we were sickened by it, silently we were reproached. We put it all in two boxes and hid the boxes in a corner of the room. (For, one day, the owners might arrive.) And we settled down. We tried to settle down. Barbara got a job as a waitress. And I got a job at the West Indian restaurant as a waiter, a waiter who sang. Late some nights, after we had finished serving, I would take down my guitar and sing a few songs. Barbara had been right. They liked it, and it was good for me. That job held Barbara and me together, that winter, longer than we might have stayed together. And the job had an effect, obliquely, on my career. A singing black waiter in the Village in those days was bound to be noticed, and so, without realizing it, I became what I was later able to sell: a personality.

It went this way: my working day began around five or six in the evening, when I unlocked the restaurant. There were about eight or ten tables. At capacity, we could serve about forty people. I was the only waiter. The restaurant was set down about three steps below the sidewalk. I unlocked the door, I swept out the joint. I checked the garbage cans, both inside and outside the restaurant. If I had left pots soaking, I scoured the pots. I set up the kitchen, putting out the cleaver and the chopping board. I chopped up the salad and made the salad dressing. I peeled the potatoes, poured the water off the black-eyed peas we always left soaking overnight, and washed the rice—for our specialty was a black-eyed peas and rice dish, called Hopping John. Then, I paused and had a drink—of black Jamaican rum. Hilda always kept a bottle in the kitchen. And by this time, Hilda, the cook, who was also the nominal owner, a big, black, and, on the whole, rather mysteriously unattached lady from the islands, had arrived, and was in the kitchen, hacking away at the ribs and the chicken. Hilda and I never said a great deal to each other; this meant that Hilda liked me and trusted me. She worked hard, she worked silently. I understood her reasons, although we never discussed them. I was sure that whatever she had saved from the years of working as a cook in private houses had been invested in this restaurant; and now she was terrified, although she masked this terror very well. She had, after all, taken on something quite formidable. With or without partners—and I didn’t know whether she had any partners or not—for a lone Negro woman to open a Negro joint in downtown New York was the kind of challenge that could easily lead to reprisals. For one thing, Hilda’s joint, which we called The Island, would certainly bring other Negroes downtown, and the people who ran the Village were not anxious for this to happen. Hilda and I both knew this, but there wasn’t much point in discussing it. Of course, our emphasis was very heavily on the islands, mightily exotic—this may have helped; and we anticipated, if we didn’t indeed help to create, the Calypso craze that was shortly to sweep the nation. Negro entertainers, working in Village clubs, very often dropped in, and this gave the place a certain “tone,” a certain vibrance, and they sometimes, if the spirit so moved them, sang or danced.

And there was something very impressive in Hilda’s stolid, silent single-mindedness. I don’t think she ever really liked running that restaurant—it was something she had to do. We knew nothing about her life at all. Unattached she certainly appeared to be. She spent very little money on herself. She sent nearly all of it back to Trinidad, without ever telling us who, there, was dependent on her efforts. And this gave her a black dignity, hard to assail. I think she liked me because, in my different way, I was as single-minded as she, as closed, and, in my way, as bold. We were a good team. If we hadn’t been, we would never have been able to manage the tremendous amount of work we had to do each evening. I surrendered the kitchen to Hilda, and set up my tables. I always brought a book with me, and, after I had set up my tables, I poured myself another glass of rum and sat down to read until the people arrived.

We ran a rather late joint. My working day never ended before one in the morning, and sometimes not until four. Some very odd people floated through the doors of that restaurant, and I guess I learned a lot there. One of the things I learned, without realizing that I was learning it, was how to dominate a room. I certainly dominated that one. If I hadn’t, I would have been trampled to death.

Here they came: a blond girl, say, with very long hair, svelte, an uptown girl, in snooty black. Her beau, crew-cutted, gabardined. They are slumming and they more or less know it, but, nevertheless, they look rather hard at me. For very dissimilar reasons, I look rather hard at them. But, as they are now in my territory, and my mother raised me right, I close my book and rise and smile—I almost said, rise and shine.

“Good evening. Can I help you?”

Hilda avoided the customers as completely as possible, for she couldn’t bear them; and at moments like these, I always seemed to hear the cleaver in the kitchen coming down particularly hard.

“We thought we might eat something.”

She is looking pleased, or looking bored; with some girls, it’s very hard to tell. Anyway, she is certainly looking bright.

“Certainly. Would you like this table?”

They are seated. The menus are before them. She is still looking bright, but he has decided to be a regular fellow. The mother doesn’t know how much I know about him. He might not make out with her, but I might know somebody, or maybe he can make out with me. I’m black, but I’m friendly, and no doubt I remind him of someone he knew in college.

“Would you like a drink?”

And wham! goes the cleaver, and I go behind the bar to prepare their martinis. I am also, I forgot to say, the only bartender. From my position behind the bar, I look into the kitchen at black and surly Hilda. The first of our signals are exchanged. Just the usual fools, I silently inform her, no trouble. I wink at her, and she winks back. Then she raises the cleaver again. Wham!

“You make a pretty good martini.”

“Thank you. Do you want to order now, or—well—have another martini?” And it was on this line I managed my most artless and dazzling smile.

“Well. We’ll see.”

“Okay. Just make yourself at home.”

Here they came: she middle-aged, fretful, all in green and orange, he balding, harried, in dark blue.

“What’s the name of this place?”

“We call it The Island. Good evening.”

“Your food any good?”

“Some people like it. Some people are addicted to it.”

Looking back, I suspect that one of the reasons they looked at me so hard was that I really didn’t give a damn if they never ate another meal again, anywhere in the world. I certainly wasn’t drumming up trade, and that was the secret behind my carefully open smile.

“Well, I guess we might as well try it. What do you think, Anita?”

They look at the other couple, look at me. I leave them in their valley of decision, and light a few candles. They sit down—at a table very near the door. I give them their menus.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Can you make a Manhattan?”

“I believe I still remember. Two?”

“Yeah. And make it snappy.”

Distrustfully, they taste their drinks. The cleaver continues to fall, and the pots are boiling, Hilda rings the bell which informs me that the first couple’s meal is ready. I serve it. He smiles at me, and winks. I smile. Then, back to my other couple.

“Would you like to order now?”

“Yeah. We’ll try the chicken. We don’t like no spices.”

“Very good. Thank you.”

Here they came: two boys, certainly under age, certainly from the Bronx, in the Village for the first time.

“Hi. Can we eat?”

“If you can’t, you won’t live long. How about this table?”

I light their candles.

“Are the ribs good?”

“I like them.”

“You the cook?”

“No. I’m the waiter. The cook is in the kitchen.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name is Leo.”

“Can we have a couple of beers?”

They are probably under age, but, on the other hand, so am I. I don’t know what Hilda is paying for protection, but I know it’s a lot.

“Okay. And two ribs?”

“Right.”

“Thank you.”

Here they came: four Southern sailors, a little drunk. This can be very tricky, but Hilda and I have this set of signals, and I always maneuver myself at such moments so that I am near the poker in the fireplace.

“Good evening. Would you like to eat?”

“Yeah. We’re hungry.”

“You’ve come to the right place, then. This table suit you?”

“Yeah. Can we get a drink?”

This is also rather tricky, for one doesn’t want sailors getting drunk in the joint. But I can’t really claim that they are too drunk to be served.

“What would you like?”

They would like boiler-makers, all around.

“Hey, where you from? You from around here?”

“I’m from New York.”

“You know where we can find some pussy?”

“All over the street. I guess.”

“Man, we been looking and we ain’t found nothing. This town is full of fagots.”

“Cheer up. It’s early. What do you want to eat?”

Looking back, I have to recognize that most of the Southerners who came into that joint surprised me. It was the Northerners who were dangerous.

“Might have me some pigs’ feet. They smell like pussy.”

“Man, they look just like a prick.”

“Now, where did you ever come across a prick with claws?”

Laughter.

Here they came: the nice blond girl from Minneapolis, who lived in the Village with her black musician husband. Eventually, he went mad and she turned into a lush. I don’t know what happened to their little boy. Here they came: Rhoda and Sam, the happiest young couple in the Village. She committed suicide, and he vanished into Spain. Here they came: two girls who worked in advertising and who lived together in fear and trembling, who told me all about their lives one drunken night. One of them found a psychiatrist, married a very fat boy in advertising, and moved to California and they are now very successful and vocal Fascists. I don’t know what happened to the other girl. Here they came: the black man from Kentucky, who called himself an African prince and had some ridiculous name, like Omar, and his trembling Bryn Mawr girl-friend, whose virginity he wore like a flag. Her family eventually had him arrested, and the girl married somebody from Yale. Here they came, the brilliant, aging Negro lawyer who lived on whiskey and benzedrine and fat white women, here they came, the bright-eyed boy from the South, who was going to be a writer and who turned into a wino, here they came, the boy who had just fled from his rich family in Florida and who was going to live a different life than theirs (“I don’t need all that money, I just want to be me”) and who turned into a junkie, here they came, the fagot painter and his Lesbian wife, who had an understanding with each other which made them brutally cruel to all their playmates and which welded them, hatefully, to each other. Here they came, the lost lonely man who worked in the shipyards and lived with his mother, who loved young boys and feared them and who jumped off a roof, here they came, the nice, middle-aged couple everyone was always glad to see, the husband of which couple, weeping and sweating, once threw me down among the garbage cans and tried to blow me—“Don’t tell Marcia. Please don’t tell my wife!”—here they came, the beautiful girl who painted and who ended up in Bellevue, here they came, the beautiful girl who was going to be a dancer and who ended up in prison, here they came, the brilliant Boston scion who liked to get fucked in the ass, and who threw himself before a subway train—which chopped off his head—here they came, my God, the wretched, the beautiful, lost and lonely, trying to live, though death’s icy mark was on them, trying to speak, though they had learned no language, trying to love although the flesh was vile, hoping to find in all the cups they tasted that taste which was joy, their joy, without which no life is worth living. Yes, I learned a lot. They frightened me, but I learned a lot. Here, one night, came Sally, with whom I was to live for nearly two years, very cool and sleek and distant, with two white, male NYU students. They were talking sociology, I thought they were full of shit, and eventually I said so, and Sally and I had a fight. Then, I haunted the NYU campus until I found her again and I made her speak to me again, like a person this time, and not like a poor relation, the object of sociological research. Here, one night, came Steve, from Pennsylvania, the wayward son of a famous general, and he fell in love with me. I have to put it that way because that’s what happened, although I know I didn’t handle it very well. But he meant a lot to me and he taught me something very valuable, a certain humility before the brutal and mysterious facts of life. Sally eventually married a Negro lawyer, a very nice man, and we’re still friendly—I guess we cost each other enough for that. Steve went off to Tangiers, and I am told that he is drinking himself to death there. Yes. My days of anger.

By and by, around about midnight, the room would be under control, the last couples sipping their coffee. The room would be rather nice then. The candles made the room seem warmer, and the people looked gentler than they were. I ate my own meals at no particular time, it depended on the traffic and on my own mood, and it didn’t matter, since I always closed the joint. Many times, I ate my supper at about two in the morning, sitting in the locked restaurant alone. Around midnight, Hilda would come out of the kitchen and sit down at her table, near the fireplace. She always brought knitting with her, I remember her hands as always busy—I think it was because she wanted most of the people who came in there to stay far away from her. Sometimes, Barbara came to pick me up, or other friends might be there. Steve spent a lot of his time there for awhile, and so did Sally—I still remember some moments, still remember Sally and Hilda, sitting at that corner table, laughing. Sally and Hilda liked each other very much, and Hilda was very disappointed when I failed to marry Sally. She felt that Sally had real class, and that I very much needed Sally’s stability. I still remember Steve, rawboned, curly-haired, slouching in, his eyes coming always directly to rest on me. It’s painful, sometimes, to look back on a life and wonder if anything you did could have made any difference. So much is lost; and what’s lost is lost forever. Was it destined to be lost, or could we have saved it? People rather made fun of Steve in those days, and I was more sensitive about this than I should have been. He was certainly exceedingly forthright, and I found this awkward as well as frightening. I must say for Sally that, later on, when she realized that Steve and I had been lovers, and might become lovers again, she did everything she could to understand it, and to understand him. But he frightened her. He frightened her in much the same way I did, for, though Sally was bright and beautiful, she was, at bottom, thoroughly respectable. That was really the trouble between us, though we may not have realized it then, and I was far too young to realize that a lone, black girl, operating in the Village then, had to be respectable or risk being destroyed.

Anyway, some nights around midnight, if the atmosphere seemed right, I would take down my guitar from where it hung above the fireplace and sit down on the high stool near Hilda’s table, and strum the guitar awhile. And the room would grow quiet and then I would sing a few songs. And the people liked it and they told their friends and sent their friends down. Hell, they should have liked it, it was all for free, and of course Hilda liked it because I was good for business. I don’t suppose that the cops liked it, but Hilda and the cops appeared to have a working arrangement and they hardly ever gave us any trouble. One night, quite late, there were only about four or five people there, I was sitting on my stool, singing, and Caleb walked in. And when he walked in, I’ll be damned if I wasn’t singing “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” I did, too. He was in the joint practically before I knew it. I saw this big, black man stooping through the doorway, and I thought, Shit, I wonder where he comes from, fuck it, I am not serving anybody else tonight, and then, so to speak, my vision cleared, and I found myself staring at Caleb.

Well, he looked wonderful—big and black and shining; safe and proud. I hadn’t seen him for the longest while. I forced myself to finish my song, while he stared at me, smiling. Hilda looked at me, and I finished my song and I said to Hilda, “That’s my brother. Caleb.” And I walked over to him. I was really very glad to see him. I couldn’t have imagined I’d be so glad.

He stood up, and he hugged me.

“Hello, little brother. You are a long way from home.”

“Hello, yourself. What brings you down here?”

“Well, if you won’t come to me, I have to come to you.”

“How is everybody?”

“Everybody’s fine. Only, they’d feel a whole lot better if they knew how you were. Yeah. Their faces would get bright, and they’d really perk up.”

“You want a cup of coffee or something? Oh. Caleb, this is Hilda, my boss. She’s the cook here, and she’s very good. You hungry? Let me fix you something to eat.”

“Now, don’t you go to no trouble for me. You take care of your customers. Or keep on singing, it’s a long time since I heard you sing. How do you do, ma’am. I’m glad to make your acquaintance.”

He and Hilda shook hands. Hilda said, “Here I been thinking you was all alone in the world, and you got this fine-looking brother.”

I said, “He got all the looks in the family, all right.”

“Is that why you don’t want people to see us together?” He laughed as he said this. I hung up my guitar.

“No kidding, you hungry? Come on, I bet you’re hungry, you’re always hungry.”

He smiled at Hilda and she smiled at him. He is, it’s true, a very nice-looking man.

“Well, all right. What have you got?”

“I made some cornbread tonight,” said Hilda. “If you anything like your brother, I know you like cornbread.”

“You must have known I was coming.” And he laughed.

“Come on in the kitchen and tell me what you want. We got chicken and ribs, you know, a whole lot of stuff.”

“Then, how come you stay so skinny? Don’t you eat here, too?”

“That’s right,” said Hilda, “you get after him. I’m glad he’s got somebody cares enough about him. Because I am not starving your brother. He does not take care of himself.”

I looked at Caleb, who was watching me with a wry, amused affection. “Waiting on tables kind of takes your appetite away,” I said. “You get to hate just about the entire human race, just because it eats. But I’ll eat with you, now.”

“You just about through? I don’t want to be no trouble.”

“Don’t talk like that. What kind of trouble—how can you be trouble? I’m just about finished, anyway.”

I remember, that night, I was very glad Barbara wasn’t there, that no one who meant anything to me was there. Hilda was very nice. She took over my duties, and even went about talking to a couple of the customers, and giving them their bills, while I loaded up Caleb’s plate, and mine. I so wanted to ask Caleb to have a drink with me, but I knew he wouldn’t drink. Then I wondered if I dared. But I’m grown now, I told myself, and I poured some ginger ale for him, and tumbler of Chianti for me.

We sat down.

“So,” he said, “tell me about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I’ve just been working—you know—and studying.”

“How’s it going?” But this was a polite question. It wasn’t the way he would have asked some time ago. He didn’t believe that my studying meant anything. He was just being polite to his kid brother, waiting for the kid to come to his senses.

And you can’t really answer a polite question, because actually no question has been asked. I felt myself squirming and I sipped my wine and I said, “It goes all right.” But I wanted to say, I think I may be making some progress, but it’s rough and I know it’s going to get rougher, and I’m very lonely.

“You still living over on the east side?”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t mention Barbara, and I didn’t either.

“What’s happening with you? How are things uptown?”

“Well, between my boss”—Caleb worked as a chauffeur for some broker who lived on Long Island—“that unhappy creature, and my work in the church, I keep pretty busy. You look tired, Leo. Aren’t you taking care of yourself?”

“Sure. But I’ve been kind of busy, too, between this job and trying to study.”

He looked at my wine glass. “You’re not drinking too much, are you? The grape has ruined many a fine man.”

I was furious, wishing that I’d poured myself a double whiskey, and abjectly glad that I hadn’t. “No.”

He still knew my moods and tones. “Don’t jump salty. I only ask because you’re my brother, and I love you. You can’t get mad at me for that.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m glad to see you.”

“Well, if you’re so glad to see me, why is it that you never do see me? You lose my address?” He paused. “You think it’s right to have Mama and Daddy worrying about you the way they do?”

“There’s nothing to worry about. I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself.”

“You’re a very young boy, Leo, in a terrible world. We’re older than you are, and we know that. We have to worry about you, you’re our flesh and blood, the youngest boy in the family. We love you. You think it’s right to make us suffer?” He paused again. “Our mother and father won’t be with us forever. You ought to try to be nice to them while they’re still around. After all, they were pretty nice to you. Weren’t they?”

By now, my food was tasteless, and my wine was sour.

“Caleb, I don’t know if I can make you understand—”

“Try. I know you think I’m just an old-fashioned goody-goody, but try. What makes you treat your family like you do? You think it doesn’t hurt us, you think we don’t have any feelings?”

I certainly couldn’t doubt, watching him, listening to him, that he had feelings. Try. Try to wake the dead, try to hold back the sea, try to talk to your brother. Try.

“Caleb, I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m just trying to live my life. But you all don’t—you don’t like my life.”

“We don’t want to see you destroying yourself, if that’s what you mean. What’s so unnatural about that?”

“I’m not destroying myself. I’m working and studying. What do you want from me?”

Naturally, at this point, a particularly ruined-looking girl came over to the table to say good-night, and to get a closer look at Caleb. She didn’t know what Caleb was thinking as she stood there, smiling and simpering and trying to make an impression on him. She made an impression, all right. I watched Caleb’s smile stiffen. His eyes filmed over with pity and scorn; he looked briefly at me. At last, she was gone.

“She’s a friend of yours?”

“She’s just a customer. She comes in sometimes. She’s a nice girl,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t said it.

“She is a very sad, lost girl. You spend much of your time with them kind of people?”

“Look. Let’s not talk about it. We’ll just get into a fight.”

“You won’t get into a fight with me,” he said, “because it takes two to quarrel, and I will never fight you. But I have to keep on at you. It’s a charge I have to keep. You’re young, and the world has got you so confused you don’t know if you’re coming or going. You’re a very unhappy boy, Leo, it sticks out all over you, and it hurts me to see it. But you haven’t got to be unhappy and the light’s going to come to you one day, just like it came to me. You’re going to see that you, and all your friends, are going to have to be unhappy just as long as you fight the love of God.”

I suppose any real conviction brings with it a species of beauty, and, as Caleb spoke, a stern and mighty beauty entered his face. I had no weapons against him.

“You’re fighting now. I know. I know how I fought. You’re going to have to learn how not to fight, not to insist on your will but to surrender your will and find yourself in the great will, the universal will, the will of God, which created the heavens and earth and everything that is, and”—he leaned forward and tapped me on the brow—“created you.” He smiled. “That’s right, little brother. You.”

He smiled, and he made me smile. I didn’t have any great objections to being God’s handiwork. But I felt that He might possibly have supplied us with a manual which would have given us some idea of how we worked.

“I’m not like you, Caleb.”

He threw back his head, and laughed. “I know you’re not like me! Why should you be like me? You think that’s what I’m talking about?” He looked at me very affectionately, still smiling. “Oh, no, Leo. I want you to be like you. That’s why God made you you. But I want you to be more like you than you are now. I want you to conquer the kingdom of the spirit. Then, you’ll be you.”

The last customers were leaving, and Hilda snuffed out their candles. We sat in the light of our candles, and the faint light that came from the kitchen, behind us. Hilda went into the bathroom.

I looked down, away from his blazing eyes, and I said, “You want some more to eat? You have enough?”

“I’m fine, thanks. But you sure didn’t eat very much.”

“I don’t have much appetite these days.”

“You’ve got too much on your mind.” He looked at me gravely; it was not a question.

“What made you come by here, Caleb—so late, tonight? You’re usually in bed by this time. Aren’t you?”

“They kept me late on the job. They’re having some kind of trouble—rich white people have more trouble than anybody else in the world. Then, when I got on the subway, something told me to make a run by here and see how you were. And I’m off tomorrow.”

Hilda came out of the bathroom, and picked up her bags and things. She had put on her turban and her earrings, and was ready to go.

“I’m going to put these bones to bed,” she said. “I didn’t leave you too much to do in the kitchen, Leo. Just put the food away, and we’ll clean up tomorrow.” She put out her hand, and Caleb took it. “You better listen to your brother,” she said, “he’s got better sense than you got. A burnt child dreads the fire.”

“That’s true,” said Caleb, and laughed. “Good-night, ma’am.”

“Okay, Hilda,” I said. “Good-night. Sleep well.”

“Good-night.”

She left, closing the door behind her, and we sat in silence for awhile. I was aware of the streets outside, of how much Caleb distrusted these streets, of all that had happened to him on these streets, and all that had happened to me. I watched his face, sculptured and melancholy in the candlelight, sculptured and proud, like a mask created at our beginning. It was an unspeaking face, obsessed forever by the fire which had formed it. Only in my own memory was it my brother’s face. When others saw Caleb, they saw a closed, proud, distant man, a man who would never reach out to them, and whom they could never reach. And the other Caleb, the raging, laughing, seeking Caleb, the Caleb who moaned and wept, the Caleb who could be lonely—that other Caleb, my brother, had been put to death and would never be seen again. I wondered if he ever thought, now, of the Caleb he had been. I wondered if he missed him at all. I missed him and was still hoping to hear from him again. But Caleb had put away childish things—why couldn’t I?

That was a useless question, but it was a real one all the same. The last time I had seen Caleb had not been so very long ago; he had not seen me. It had not been the first time I had peeked in, so to speak, on his life. I couldn’t but wonder if he hadn’t found some mighty secret, a secret which I needed. For he seemed not to despise himself anymore. Terrible things would not happen to him anymore, and he would no longer do terrible things. But I could not risk saying this to him. I could not risk seeing him. The last time I had seen him had been the day I drove the Workshop car from the town to the city. I wandered around the city. I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t force myself to mingle with the people for that long. Watching Caleb’s face, watching Caleb watching his little brother, I remembered that I ducked into one of the movies on 42nd Street and sat in the top row and I let a white boy grope me and stroke me and finally I forced his blond head down on me and I made him give me a blow job. Then I felt sicker than I had felt before and I felt like murdering the poor white fagot who, with my white hot sperm still in him, crept quietly down the stairs, away. I couldn’t watch the movie, couldn’t stand the voices, didn’t know what they were saying, didn’t care, couldn’t stand the stink of people. I left the movie. I stopped and bought a hot dog and a soda. I watched the people. I walked back to the car, and I drove down to the Village. I went to a bar I knew and had a couple of beers. It was just about the cocktail hour, but no one I knew came in. I let another fagot pick me up and feed me. I asked him for money, too, and he gave me three dollars. I got away from him by about ten o’clock, and I drove uptown to Harlem. I wanted to see my mother and father; but I didn’t want them to see me. So, I drove through our block and I looked at our house. Their lights were on.

I stopped, finally, as I had known all along, really, that I would, in front of a great stone building which, in Harlem’s heyday, had been a theater. It was now The New Dispensation House of God. It seemed very lively, especially for a Monday night.

I walked inside and walked upstairs to the balcony. I was nearly all alone there, though, on Sunday nights, it was packed. A few idle men, a few lonely and bewildered women; but, downstairs, the faithful were rejoicing. Caleb could not see me, I sat far to the side, in the shadows, but I could see Caleb. He sat just below the pulpit. That meant that, tonight, he was in charge of the testimony service.

He still looked like my brother—big and black—the transforming power of the Holy Ghost leaves some elements untouched. There was a light in his face which I envied and despised: Caleb was at peace. He had told me so. He had told me so. Caleb was found, but I was lost.

Caleb had had the tambourine. A plain black girl was at the piano. Somebody was beating the drum. They were singing:

Down on my knees,

When trouble rides!

I talk to Jesus,

He satisfies!

He promised me

He’d hear my plea,

If I would serve Him,

Down on my knees!

I had sat in the darkness, cursing and crying, my tears falling like a curtain between my brother and myself. My head was bowed and I could scarcely see them, but I could hear:

If I would serve Him,

Down on my knees!

I watched his face now, wondering if he had ever spied on my life as I had spied on his.

“When are you coming up to the house?”

“Let’s see—what’s today? Caleb, I don’t see how I can come until my day off. That’s Thursday.”

He accepted this with a tiny, wry smile. With a certain defiance, I sipped my wine. “This is a pretty good job for you, I guess.”

“It suits me. The people don’t bother me. You know.”

“What do most of the people around here do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of people. The people I know—well, they mainly all want to be artists of one kind or another.”

“How do they go about it?”

“Well—they work at it. Some of them do.”

“They’re not just kidding themselves?”

I looked at him. “Some of them are. Naturally.”

“Leo,” he asked me, after a moment, “can you tell me what it is—an artist? What’s it all about? What does an artist really do?”