“THAT’S about all,” Sam said after he had finished telling his story to Hal Clair in the office of the Harlem Equality League. The noonday sun broomed inside upon a cluttered interior that was full of Monday’s newspapers; there were two roll-top desks so close together they made the office like a storage room; battered files ranged in a row against the stained wood partition. The partition stopped a foot short of the ceiling, dividing Hal Clair’s cubby hole from the even smaller office of his secretary. Uneasily, Sam realized that the secretary had heard everything. He had a feeling that he was indiscriminately shouting his experiences to a mob of strangers. He felt uncomfortable with Hal Clair. Clair was in his middle forties and he didn’t look like a Negro, his skin the white of a Spaniard’s, his features cut small and fine. His eyes were hazel and he wore a black mustache over his thin lips. His grey tweed suit was almost the same pattern as Sam’s and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard hung from a chain looped across his vest.
“I appreciate your confidence, Mr. Miller,” Clair said finally. “Too bad you didn’t choose to see me yesterday. Perhaps, and I am not stating this as an iron-clad statement, perhaps we might have succeeded in moderating the tone of the meeting.”
Sam waited for Clair to express an opinion. Opinions! God Almighty, he was getting fed up with opinions. He was sorry he’d ever come to this office. The desks and files were littered with newspapers, the metropolitan papers; sheets from Atlanta, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, the dates of the past week on their mastheads; there were the papers of the Negro press, The A fro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, and all these newspapers had been blue-penciled, items clipped out. It was as if they had been blown in through the window from the street outside. Sam heard the red and yellow crosstown trolleys, below, on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and suddenly he couldn’t stand Clair’s silences. “They didn’t carry much on yesterday’s meeting,” he said.
“What did you say? I beg your pardon.”
“There wasn’t much in the papers about the meeting.”
“Very little. Mr. Miller, how seriously have you endangered your position by coming here?”
Sam laughed. “I should have mentioned it before but I was down at Headquarters this morning. I saw Deputy Inspector Coombs and I told him how I felt about straightening myself out with people like you. I was all prepared to resign and I had the surprise of my life — Coombs wouldn’t think of me resigning. I showed Coombs the leaflet put out by the bunch calling themselves the United Negro Committee and said I wanted to run them down. I said that I’d have to cooperate with the Harlem Equality League and other Negro organizations. Well, Coombs thought I was crazy. I could see it in his face and then he said why didn’t I take a leave of absence. I said I’d be glad to but did that mean I could be free to cooperate with Negro organizations — ”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he’d leave it to my judgment but that he strongly advised against it. He said I needed a vacation more than anything. Anyway, here I am still on the force. Maybe, this’ll sound cynical to you, Mr. Clair, what I’m going to say. But we’re not going to get anywhere unless there’s understanding between us. You said if I’d seen you yesterday you might have succeeded in toning them down. Well, I don’t think so. Like I told you, I was at that meeting and this may sound cynical but the All-Negro Harlem Committee’s a political committee and they’re committed to political action. They’re out to get me before the D. A. They won’t get to first base but that’s what they’re after. Now, the way I see it: Here I am still on the force. If I talk to the Councilman, I think he’d be suspicious of me. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not making myself clear, Mr. Clair, but I feel that if I could go to the All-Negro Committee after I’d done something and not just go pounding my breast, I’d be better off. What I want to do is work with you. I want to help you run down the bunch printing those leaflets. They’re criminals and I know something about criminals.”
Clair frowned, playing with his Phi Beta key with two tapering white fingers. “It is an unusual situation — ”
“You know Johnny Ellis, Mr. Clair? Well, Sunday after the meeting, Johnny tailed one of the men handing out leaflets.”
“Really? Any results?”
“None. The man he tailed turned out to be a poolroom hanger-on. Johnny got friendly with him and got the whole story. He told Johnny that a guy he’d never seen came into the poolroom early on Sunday. This guy got to talking about Randolph and the lowdown cops and then he asked the men in the poolroom if they wanted to do their share for Harlem by passing out a few leaflets and make three bucks at the same time. That’s the gist of it.”
“Merely a blind alley?”
“We’ll hit a lot of blind alleys, Mr. Clair.” He took the two green paper leaflets from his pocket and placed them down on the desk in front of Clair. He had risen from his chair and now he was leaning over Clair’s shoulder. “I’m no detective but I’ve been trained in criminal investigation. Look at those leaflets, Mr. Clair. It’s a known fact that con-men’ll keep the initials of their first names even when they invent phony names for themselves. A con-man born John Brown’ll change his name to James Smith. He’ll hold onto the J — ”
“What are you trying to say?” Clair’s eyes were amused.
“I’m saying everything backwards today. Those two leaflets were printed by the same bunch. It isn’t the green paper that gives them away. It’s the style. They have the same style. We can locate the writer by the style. He likes to play around with the K.K.K. idea as you see. ‘Mick cops who think.k.k. they’re the old massa down south’ And yesterday’s: ‘We don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) in Harlem.’ ”
Clair glanced from the leaflets, gazing through the window on his right down on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. Anxiously, Sam stared at Clair’s profile, the thin nose, the angular chin; except for the mustache it was like the profile of a Latin priest, ascetic and reserved. He was a queer fish, Sam thought; neither black nor white.
“I believe your enthusiasm is running away with you, Mr. Miller,” Clair said. “Are you aware of the number of organizations that have been publishing leaflets of this category in the past ten years?”
“Dozens, I suppose.”
“Hundreds.”
“But the style can be traced, Mr. Clair. Johnny Ellis, you know, he’s on some inter-race committee in his union and he says that many of the anti-fascist organizations have collections of these leaflets. Please, Mr. Clair, don’t turn me down. It means a lot to me. A letter of introduction from you’d help me a lot.”
“I suppose I can do that much for you.”
“Thanks. Can I have it now?”
Clair’s thin lips twisted in a wry smile. “You can.” He raised his modulated voice and called to his secretary. “Miss Burrow, will you please come in.”
The secretary pushed open the door in the partition, entering, and smiling at the two men. She stood near one of the files, a plump very light brown girl in her twenties. She was wearing a black dress striped with long vertical red ribs of color and her legs were shapely, Sam noticed, inside their sheer stockings. Almost she looked Spanish, too, with her high-bridged nose and full red lips but a Spanish mixed with Negro blood. Observing her, Sam’s uneasiness about the Harlem Equality League and its personnel increased; Hal Clair who didn’t seem like a Negro at all; the secretary who seemed Negro only on second thought. It certainly was strange. What kind of a Negro was Clair anyway and what had prevented him from passing over into the white world? And why had Clair chosen as his secretary a girl like Miss Burrow?
Clair was dictating. “ ‘To Whom It May Concern. Mr. Samuel Miller is doing volunteer work for the Harlem Equality League. He is to be assisted in his efforts. I will appreciate any cooperation shown to him …’ ” Miss Burrow’s black eyes flashed up from her shorthand pad and she smiled quickly at Sam. Her white teeth shown in two even dazzling lines against the warm fruit-like coloring of her skin. Her eyes met Sam’s and he was conscious of a taunting invitation in those eyes, conscious of her silky black hair as she turned on her heel and glided through the partition into the outer office. Clair appeared to have noticed nothing, remarking, “You’ll have your letter in a few minutes.”
“Thanks. You think I’m a pest,” he added grimly. “I don’t blame you, Mr. Clair.”
“How do you intend to conduct your investigation?”
“There are two ways to conduct one. One way’s the stool pigeon method. Cops’ll tell you that the greatest dick is the one with the greatest number of stool pigeons. The other way’s the hard way. Getting all the facts we can and putting them together. That goes for muggers or fascists.” He listened to Miss Burrow’s typewriter pounding out the letter of introduction and he thought that she was on the make. Or was that his dirty copper’s mind? A hot flush burned up his neck and when the secretary returned with the letter for Mr. Clair to sign, Sam didn’t look at her. He was bitterly ashamed of himself.
All afternoon, that Monday, Sam read the throwaways, the leaflets, the pamphlets published by the various shirt outfits. No one organization had a complete file but their secretaries suggested new sources. Towards four o’clock, his eyes ached. The slogans of hate, the sentences of vitriol had hooked one onto the other in his mind like pieces of barbed wire, an endless coil: For A White Gentile America. Return America To The Americans. Jewish Plutocratic Communism Will Lead To A Mongrel Negroid Jewish Nation. Niggers Learn Your Place. The Lusting Nigger Stands At Your Wife’s Bedroom Window. Unions Are A Kike Invention. The Next Time Look At The Shapes Of The Noses Of The People Speaking About Liberty. Niggers Are Not Men For They Have Only Been Out Of The Jungle A Few Centuries.
Patiently he had skimmed through the outpourings, the diatribes, the invectives of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, comparing the faded letters with the two leaflets printed on green paper. An image of spewing mouths, of waving fists and contorted faces haunted him. Out of the creased flaunting black capitals, a terrible spectre arose. Sam was sitting at a flat desk in an office building on lower Fourth Avenue but now this spectre seized him and he was in the South, in the mid-western industrial centers, in the Atlantic seaboard cities with their large Jewish populations. The lyncher’s rope dangled over the flat desk and the brass knucks crept up behind him. He shuddered, remembering the nightmare on the land: the hooded men of the South ripping the testicles off Negroes; the Christian Fronters knifing Jews in the New York subways; the speeding automobiles with the broken bodies of union organizers and “Reds” on the floorboards under the stained heels. His consciousness echoed the “heils” of all these new orders, these legions for white supremacy, these Christian Protestant Americans and the blood and tears of the murdered and the maimed spilled in his throat until he felt that he himself must perish. Those two green leaflets were like a key in some shadowy door and behind the door was the nightmare, the spectre, the doom that was always waiting, that would always be waiting to whirl out upon the people until the door was smashed, until the key and the lock were destroyed, until the nightmare was banished by the sunlight in man that also lay waiting to be released. There was hope, Sam thought soberly. Suzy said there was, Johnny said there was, Cashman said there was. There was!
He looked over his notes:
1) Both leaflets written from the Negro viewpoint. Both strongly nationalistic and anti-white.
2) Leaflet 1 is anti-Italian, anti-Jewish, anti-Irish. Jew used three times, wop, twice; mick, twice.
3) Leaflet 1 has the “think.k.k” line.
4) Leaflet 2 is anti-Jewish and anti-Italian but not anti-Irish. Jew used once, kike used once, wop used once. Instead of line about Irish cops in leaflet 1, a line about Reds is substituted. The K.K.K. line is Kike Killer Kops in this leaflet.
Sam leaned over his notes, and started to ask himself questions. Why was the first leaflet more explanatory than the second one? “Our Enemy Isn’t Only The Jew Cop Miller”; “Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes”; “Jewboy Landlords And Bankers”; “Mick Cops”; “Red Uncle Tom (Bogus) Negroes”. But the second leaflet signed “United Negro Committee” was more revealing in some ways, Sam thought. Why had the anti-Irish stuff been cut? Did that mean whites had put out the second leaflet? Whites! Not Negroes, not the “United Negro Committee”! But whites! But one pen had written both leaflets. Or could he be sure of that? Harlem had plenty of nationalistic Negro groups, any one of whom might have produced those leaflets. But that line, “We Don’t want any K.K.K. (Kike Killer Kops) In Harlem” was Christian Front Doctrine; hadn’t Coughlin’s “Social Justice”, before it was banned, agitated against Jewish policemen? That was a fact to remember. Then the timing of the leaflets; the first one passed out almost coincidentally with the All-Negro leaflet; the second right after the mass meeting in the Silver Trumpet ball room. What did that mean? The second leaflet had been timed to implement the purpose of the mass meeting. The meeting’d not been anti-Jewish but it had been anti-cop brutality. The second leaflet had reiterated the mass meeting’s demand for Negro unity but it lacked the anti-white feeling of the first leaflet. Why had the second leaflet soft-pedaled its anti-white propaganda? Why the cutting of the line about the Irish? Why the confused or confusing identification of K.K.K. (which as everyone knew stood for Kike Koon Katholic) with Kike Killer Kop? The second leaflet marked a strong effort to channel Harlem’s discontent and anger against one scapegoat, the Jewish cop. It attacked “wops” in one reference, “Reds” in one reference, “lynchers” in one reference. But the build-up was on himself. “Why?” Sam asked out loud. Steadfastly he answered his own question. They, whoever they were, were out to get him.
Towards five o’clock Sam turned the corner into One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street, climbing the single flight of stairs that separated the Harlem Equality League office from Harlem. He stepped into the outer office and said hello to Miss Burrow. “Is Mr. Clair in?”
She smiled at him from her desk. “As fellow workers here you can call me Marian.”
He wondered if her crack about fellow workers meant that she regarded him as a Red. Her head pivoted towards the closed door in the partition, her throat pale cream brown in color, her shoulders fleshing solidly and handsomely into her neck. “Oh Mr. Clair,” she called. “Mr. Miller to see you.”
“Come in,” Clair said. Sam walked into the inner office and Clair smiled. “Any results? Come in. I have some real news.”
“What news?”
“Take those newspapers from that chair and make yourself comfortable, won’t you? Before I tell you my news, I would like to hear what you have to say.”
“I’m on the track. It’s a pretty broad track, Mr. Clair. First, I broke down the two leaflets and then I tried to see where they came from. Something like that radio program ‘Missing Heirs.’ I found four heirs, four men who had written stuff using the same sort of style.”
“Who are these men?”
“The Nazi Kalb who used to be in charge of Bundist camps. Congressman Patton. Rodney of Iowa. And a newspaperman called Manders who wrote for the yellow press, a brass-checker as Upton Sinclair described them. It’s not much. I’m not as good at research as I used to be in school. But Manders is out. He went to Germany just before Pearl Harbor. Kalb’s been interned quite a while — ”
“I believe you can eliminate the Congressman. Patton is too busy fighting the poll tax and speaking against Negroes for the Congressional Record to engage in any leaflet writing.”
“Eliminate Patton and we’re nowheres. I checked on Rodney and I found he’s still out in the corn belt. All we have is this Kalb-Manders-Patton-Rodney style. Somebody here in New York is copying that style.”
Clair picked up a pad scrawled with pencil notes, read them, put the pad to his left on the desk. He raised one admonishing finger at Sam. “Before I begin, Mr. Miller, I want to warn you against jumping to easy conclusions. We, who have been in Harlem for years are apt to be more cautious. I have been with the Harlem Equality League for eight years and I have a general perspective that you haven’t.” He again picked up the pad and read:
“ ‘Bars and grills reporting disturbances. The Sunshine Bar and Grill. The Lenox Bar. The Paddleford Bar. The Paradise Grill. Celtic Bar. Leone’s Bar. The Happy Hour Bar. Four Flags Bar and Grill.’ “ His phone rang. “Pardon me,” he said to Sam. “Yes, hello. Yes, this is Mr. Clair. Yes, yes. One minute.” He dug a yellow pencil from under a heap of newspaper clippings, pushed the pad in front of him, writing down what the voice on the telephone was saying. When he hung up, he nodded excitedly. “That was another one. The Aventine Grill.” He counted down on his pad. “Eleven Italian-owned bars have had disturbances this afternoon.”
“What kind of disturbances?” Sam asked. Clair wasn’t listening to him. “What kind of disturbances?”
“They were all the same. A Negro would go inside and shout that Negroes should not patronize Italian bars that refused to employ Negro help.”
“How do you know they’re all Italian?”
“They told me so. The names.”
“Who phoned just now?” Sam was sitting on the edge of his chair. He itched to grab the pad from Clair’s fingers and see for himself.
“The owner of the Aventine Grill, a Mr. Carlucci.”
“How come? I hope you don’t mind my questions but what I don’t know about Harlem or the methods of your organization’d fill a book. Why did Carlucci ring you and not the police?”
“He’s probably phoned the police, too. Why do they phone the Harlem Equality League?” He spoke formally as if at a forum. “We have been in Harlem fifteen years. Wide sections of the population are acquainted with our work. Tens of thousands have heard of our platform: ‘Better relations between white and Negro for the common good of the community’.” He tapped the pad with his pencil. “That’s why they phone us, white as well as black.”
“Have you spoken to any of these Italian bar owners?”
“To all of them.”
“I meant have you seen any of them to talk to?”
“Only Mr. Leone of Leone’s Bar. He was here at two o’clock.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Mr. Leone threatened me. He said I ought to stop ‘the bad colored’.” Clair grinned unhappily. And Sam, even though his nerves were tingling and the blood had rushed into his head, noticed that grin and fleetingly sympathized. Clair, too, was a scapegoat.
“We ought to see every one of these men, Mr. Clair. There’s a connection between these disturbances and the leaflets. The first leaflet attacks, to quote from memory, ‘Wop Bar Owners Who Won’t Hire Negroes’.”
“I knew you would think that.”
“What else can you think? The first leaflet has two anti-Italian references.”
“I warned you not to jump to conclusions, Mr. Miller.”
“Eleven bars! The timing! It isn’t only one or two bars. But eleven. That’s disturbance organized. That’s fascism!”
“You do not understand Harlem,” Clair reproved him gently. “In addition you are minimizing the possibility of an accidental connection between the disturbances and the leaflets. How can you be positive that there is a direct causative connection? Please let me continue, Mr. Miller. I think that what I have to say may be of help. First of all, there has long existed a great deal of animosity on the part of many Negroes against the Italian-owned bars, who in the majority of cases do not hire Negroes. Many Negro trade union leaders, many ministers have spoken against this practice. Both of Harlem’s newspapers, The People’s Advocate only recently, have exposed these bars and their anti-Negro labor policy. Now, Mr. Miller, would you call these people and these newspapers fascistic? Let us not bandy that epithet so casually.”
“I see your point. But eleven grills. Would you mind if I copied your list? I’d like to talk to these people.” As Clair hesitated, Sam realized that this man with the Phi Beta key from Harvard still didn’t trust him completely. He was still a Harlem cop who had killed a Negro only one week ago. Blood was strong, as his father had raved last Monday night, and this white man who wasn’t a white man had no faith in him. “I don’t blame you for being worried about me, Mr. Clair. All you know about me is that Johnny Ellis was once a friend of mine. But I’m still a cop on leave of absence. You don’t know whether I’m on the level and I don’t know how to convince you. All I can say is trust me a little. As for these grills, I’d like to investigate them. I promise not to do anything without your okay.” Still Clair was silent. The late afternoon light poured through the window, flowing down the yellow enamel of Clair’s pencil. “Mr. Clair, it isn’t easy for me to come to you in the first place. It isn’t easy for me to do what I’m doing. A cop has a strong sense of discipline. It isn’t easy to be doing something no other cop has done. It isn’t easy to go after something that you can’t even see.”
“All right,” said Clair. “Copy my list. I’ll see you in the morning, Miller.” It was the first time he had discarded the “Mr.”
Sam wrote down the addresses of the bars, stood up, said goodnight and shut the door behind him. “Goodnight,” he said to Marian Burrow.
“One minute, Sam,” she said easily, smiling.
He paused, feeling giddy. The partition divided not only two offices but two emotional whirlpools and now it was as if he had plunged, without taking a breath, deep into the thoughts he had been thinking about her and had almost forgotten. “Yes?”
“I neglected to tell you when you came in. A Miss Buckles phoned while you were out. Said to be sure and ring her at her office. Said she’d be expecting your call.” The black eyes confronted him, one corner of the red mouth dimpling up slyly into the rounded cheek. “You can use the phone here.”
“Thanks. I’m busy. Goodnight.” Descending the stairs, he tried to come to some definite opinion about Marian Burrow. Was she on the make? Or was she just friendly? If she’d been a white girl would he have thought her on the make? But she wasn’t a white girl. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing about Negroes as human beings like himself. Absolutely nothing. All he had known were the statistics of a people: So many lynched. So many millions in tenements and cabins. So many in the spot news: Robeson, Yergan, Wright, Davis, Randolph, Louis. But what went on inside their hearts? They were like the inhabitants of a city he had never seen, a city read about, and now he had come to the gates. Downstairs, on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth, he stared at the passing Negroes, stirred by a tremendous groping curiosity. What were they all thinking of, hoping for, praying for?
He went into an ice-cream parlor, phoning Johnny at his place of work (for he had promised to ring Johnny about how he had made out with Clair) and then Suzy. He arranged to meet both of them in front of Grant’s Bar on Times Square. Johnny was working over-time and he told Sam that eight o’clock suited him fine; Sam told Suzy to go on home but she said he wasn’t getting rid of her as he had on Sunday; her voice was anxious when he mentioned the Italian bars; she said he ought to be careful. Sam hung up finally, rushing out of the ice-cream parlor. He could have picked some better mid-way point than Times Square, he thought. But it was too late now.
He walked west, never noticing the white faces in the going-home crowds, the Harlem Finns and Swedes, the Irish, Italians, Jews. There were only black faces; black women with linoleum shopping bags, roller-skating kids with bruised brown knees, laborers in work shoes crusted with plaster. He had boarded the crosstown street as a man gets on a subway, shuttling now between these Harlem flats and stores. And all these people? What did they want? How did they feel about the war when they were among themselves and no whites were listening?
On Seventh Avenue, Sam pushed into the Aventine Grill. He stepped to the bar, ordered a beer from a big Italian bartender with bushy black eyebrows. It was a small place, the walls painted olive green and decorated with the lithographs distributed gratis by the whiskey manufacturers. He was the only white customer, he observed. A half dozen or so Negroes were leaning on the bar, glasses at elbow. Sam winked at the bartender, who wiped his hands on his apron and slowly, his shoulders swinging, eased over. Sam said. “I want to talk to Mr. Carlucci.”
The bartender looked him over. “I’m him.” He spoke out of the corner of his mouth as if he had been reared in some Irish neighborhood.
“Are you the boss?”
“Who wants to know?”
Sam jerked his thumb towards the rear. Beyond a pinball game, there were a half a dozen tables with wire legs; at one of them a middle-aged man was sitting. “Is that the boss?”
“I ast you who wants to know?”
“The Harlem Equality League sent me over.”
“I guess it’s okay, mister. That’s the boss. He’s my uncle so we got the same name.” The bartender’s face, wooden and impersonal as a beer barrel suddenly opened two worried eyes. “Maybe you guys can do somethin’?”
Sam hurried over to Mr. Carlucci’s table. “You phoned the Harlem Equality League and they sent me over.”
Mr. Carlucci was thin and bald and he had a toothpick between his teeth. Without removing it, he said, “Yes?”
“We want to help you.”
“Yeh?”
“What happened?”
“You don’t look colored.”
“I’m not. I’m white.”
“You look like a wop like me?”
Sam smiled. “What happened, Mr. Carlucci?”
“But you work for the colored?”
“You could say that.”
“They must pay you good money?”
“What happened?”
“I don’t expect nothin’, mister. I don’t expect a single thing from nobody. Not from you, not from the cops. Didn’t I phone the station house and the desk sarge sends a cop over who guzzles three beers which I mark down on his account — ” He wrote on air with his forefinger. “Then, he blows out so a colored man here a good customer o’ mine, good as a white man, lemme tell you, he sees the cop guzzlin’ my beer and when the cop blows out, he says why don’t I get the Harlem Equalities.” He pronounced the name swiftly like the name of a ball team. “And I says who are they and he says they can help me. I don’t take his word, see. I’ll tell you the unvarnished, mister. I don’t take nobody’s word in Harlem so I call the desk sarge and I ask him about the Harlem Equalities and he say you’re Reds. See, mister, I tell you just how it is. But the desk sarge tells me you got influence among the colored and that’s good enough for me.” He had removed the toothpick and now glared up front at the Negroes at the bar. They would drink a beer or two or a small whiskey and leave and other Negroes would come in. It didn’t seem to Sam as if there had ever been any trouble. “I don’t expect a single thing, mister. That’s Harlem for you. Don’t I know how the colored feel about the wops? It’s been n.g. since the Doochay jumped on Selassie so they take it out on me. I’m Mussolini! A hell of a Mussolini I am! Maybe the colored gotta right with the big bars where there’s a dozen guys workin’ and all of ‘em white except maybe the porter who cleans out the can and all the dough, colored dough. But I’m a small joint like you see. The barkeep’s my nephew. Just the two of us. So what the hell they want of me?”
“Who started the trouble today?”
“Who you think? The colored.”
“I’m trying to get at the facts, Mr. Carlucci. What time was it?”
“About five o’clock it was. In comes this big nigger — ” He glanced at Sam. “It slipped the tongue, mister. You ain’t gonna hold it against me?”
“Go on.”
“There was about six guys at the bar like now. I never got it busy. This big colored begins to holler like a son-of-a-bitch. ‘Call yourself colored,’ he says or somethin’ like that. ‘Some colored you are,’ he says or something like that. ‘Drinkin’ in a wop dive.’ He calls this place a dive, the big bastard.”
“How big was he?”
“A six footer. Maybe bigger.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Like nothin’ much. A big face and he was wearin’ a dark suit.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said they wasn’t real Negroes but yellows — that was his wisecrack and he hollers about the killing of that nut Randolph last week. And me here, you know what I was doin’, of all the lamebrains! I was askin’ that guy to ack like a gennelman. Should’ve listened to my nephew who wanted to give’m the bottle. But what the hell, who wants to be the first to start a riot? Not me. He hollers some more that I gyp ‘em. I gyp ‘em! I keep the best beer. You don’t catch me givin’ the customer rubbin’ alky out of a bottle with a fancy label. I sell good stuff.”
“Was this Negro alone?”
“Yeh.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary before he showed up?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Was there any sign that you were going to have trouble before he showed up?”
“No.”
“Have your customers been talking much about Randolph? Or the meeting or about the different leaflets?”
Mr. Carlucci looked up at the ceiling as if to say: That’s all they do talk about. “I’m neutral,” he declared. “I know from nothin’. I mind my own business. When some guy grouches heavy maybe I say it’s too bad the nut got himself bumped, only I don’t say nut to them. They’re awful touchy, the colored. They’re like the Jews. One for all and all for one.” He leaned his head on both elbows and muttered. “I been here, you wouldn’t believe it, eighteen years and I can tell that feelin’.”
“What kind of a feeling?”
“Mister, ever hear of a riot? Get twenty more like that big bastard who come in here and you get yourself a riot. Think he listened when I tell’m I can’t hire a colored man. What’ll I do with the nephew? Five kids and a wife. But that big bastard keeps on hollerin’ until the customers walk out except two guys and one of ‘em tells me to call the Harlem Equalities so I done it.”
“Thanks for the information, Mr. Carlucci.”
“Okay. Have a drink on the house.”
In the next two hours, he spoke to a whole series of proprietors. Only a few wouldn’t talk to him. Mostly, they had a this-is-what-happened attitude. It was after eight o’clock before he took the downtown subway. Hanging on a strap, he asked himself what he had found out? The corpus delicti, he answered himself wearily. The good old corpus delicti, the body of the crime, only there was no body. He had a collection of miscellaneous facts about as valuable as his Kalb-Manders-Congressman Patton-Rodney facts; he was a great detective and he’d be an encyclopedia of useless information before he wound up.
The subway thundered into Seventy-Second Street station, into yellow light and new passengers entering between the rubber-edged doors that slid back into metal like blades into their sheaths. He had accomplished nothing the whole long day. Those bars now? The motive had been to pull Negroes out of the Italian bars. He could have stayed in Clair’s office and been as well off. The time? From one p.m. right into the evening. Number of bars? More than the eleven Clair had known of. Several of the proprietors had mentioned other Italian bars not on Clair’s list. Twenty-five bars, approximately. But this wasn’t another Monday in another week. It was the Monday after mass meeting. Sam’s head felt hot as if he were on the verge of a cold. All the facts, half-facts, prejudices and curses he had heard from bar owners and bartenders tumbled inside his brain. All of them had agreed that the hit-run Negroes were big men. Estimated heights went from five feet ten to over six feet. To Sam, this detail, better than anything else, illustrated white Harlem’s pulse beat. From his experience as a policeman, he knew that people reporting the height of a burglar or a mugger usually exaggerated by five inches; five inches added on by the ruler of intense emotion. That was a fact, important not as court evidence, but as a searchlight playing upon the witnesses themselves. Perhaps, the whole city would react in the same way when the story broke in the morning papers.
One other detail had also barbed itself into his consciousness. After his interview with Mr. Carlucci, he had begun asking the others whether any out-of-the-ordinary acts had been committed by the hit-runners. It was a question derived from his professional knowledge of criminals and what a police interrogation should consist of; often malefactors would eat, drink, smoke or commit other acts at the scene of a crime which might serve as guideposts to their identities. The proprietor of the Four Flags Bar and Grill had shown Sam a crumpled leaflet that had been thrown into his face. It was the leaflet put out by the All-Negro Harlem Committee. Was it a plant? Why hadn’t the other leaflets been thrown? Why just this one? Who, anyway, was behind all these “big Negroes”? And how could they be apprehended? There was no evidence to speak of. There had been no arrests as far as he knew. Sam stared at the pale reflection of himself in the rattling subway glass. Suppose the All-Negro Harlem Committee were secretly behind the anti-Italian agitation? How did he know they weren’t? Maybe, that was why Clair had been so reluctant about having him work for the Harlem Equality League?
Sam pushed through the turnstile at Times Square. He hurried through the electric underground of stores situated near the tracks, the drinking places, shooting galleries, gardenia stands, all a little macabre like a living waxworks in the glaring light. He climbed to the street level. The red and blue neons of Grant’s Bar glowed softly in the twilight, and among other people waiting for sweethearts and husbands, he saw Suzy and Johnny. They weren’t together and Sam realized they had never met; they didn’t know each other. He waved his hand, darted through the crosstown automobiles as if he were playing football again. “Suzy, hello.” He grabbed her hand and half-pulled, half-guided her over to where Johnny was standing. “Hello, Johnny. This is my girl, Suzy.” Hungry people with eyes fascinated by Grant’s hot dogs charged like horses after a day’s work between Sam and Suzy and Johnny. From the doors, a smell of pickles, mustard, weenies and beer rolled out.
“This is Johnny, Suzy,” Sam was saying. “I forgot you two were strangers. Boy, I’ve got lapses of memory these days. I’ll make some detective.”
Suzy smiled. “Glad to meet you, Johnny.”
“Same here.” Johnny had a folded evening newspaper under his arm.
Suzy took Sam’s hand. “What a lug you are. I don’t know about your friend but I’ve been here since eight. Eight sharp!”
“Did you eat?” Sam asked her.
“Not too much. My appetite’s weak when I eat without you, dear.”
“How about it, Johnny?” Sam said. “I’m starved.” Johnny nodded and the three of them swung inside. Sam stared at the huge counter with its rows and rows of sizzling hot dogs. “Just look at ‘em.”
“Why were you so late?” Suzy said.
“There’s a time and a place,” Sam said, trying to catch the eye of the girl in charge of the counter. Suzy poked her elbow into his ribs and he twisted his head sideways, smiling down at her tilted chin. “Why, it’s you.”
The neon light polished her light brown hair so that she almost seemed blond. A round black hat like an inflated beret was on her head and she was wearing a black dress with a red block S stitched under her right shoulder. She placed one finger on the S. “A new dress and with your initial.”
He laughed as the girl behind the counter took his order and slapped three hot dogs on a plate. He paid the girl fifteen cents and said to Suzy, “My initial’s M.”
“M as in mutt,” Suzy said. The girl behind the counter stared at Suzy dispassionately; at Grant’s Bar you heard all kinds popping off all day long. Sam noticed that stare as the three of them squeezed over to the mustard pot. He was glad they had come to Grant’s, to this subway rush of gulping eaters. The interior stretched before him busy as Grand Central Station. There were hot meat stands on both ends, chefs in white hats perched high above the clamoring customers. Everywhere men were standing about, nickel beers in their hands, sucking up clams at the seafood bar, leaning on the brass rail. Near Sam, a woman with an elegant marcel was chewing away on a red pepper. High school kids, clerks, soldiers, sailors were gobbling up french fries, hamburgers, roast beef sandwiches. A continuous flow of eaters surrounded the tables set like islands in the middle of the floor. “Know why I picked this place?” he asked Suzy.
“Why?”
“I can’t hear your wisecracks above the noise.”
“Did you resign?”
“No. But I’m working with Clair.”
Johnny wiped a mustard stain from his lips with his handkerchief, his eyes meeting Sam’s. “I’m glad to hear that. How about another hot dog?”
“Not for me,” Suzy said. “Got to watch my complexion. My boss is particular.” As Johnny left them to get the franks, Sam pinched her cheek.
“Well, old spitfire, I’m glad to see you.”
“Without the hands, caveman, especially when you’ve got them covered with mustard.”
“I have not.”
“Anyway, don’t be so glad to see me.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t heard what you’ve been up to.”
“The Deputy Inspector!”
“Does Johnny always look so sad and quiet?”
“I didn’t notice — ”
“Sh. Here he comes.”
With the second round of hot dogs they each had a beer, and then Sam and Johnny had a second beer while Suzy puffed on a cigarette and read off the whiskey specials listed behind the bar. When they pushed out to Forty-Second Street and over to Broadway, the avenue once as vivid as fireworks, was dimmed out; the huge Wrigley swimming fish neon and the liquor signs dead for the duration. It depressed Sam a little, this living darkness of dancehall girls, side-street Broadwayites walking off their dinners, movie fans, New Jerseyites, stenos, out of towners, tourists from the outlying boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Boys in khaki, Australian pilots, Canadian soldiers. De Gaullists, Russian merchant marine men would loom up as if washed onto the beach of the dark avenue from all the oceans and continents. He peered at the fighting men and wondered if any of those soldiers and sailors had noticed Suzy with her arm through Johnny’s as well as through his own. He was disgusted with his own self-consciousness. Those men in uniforms had come from all the lands; they had fought in the Coral Seas, in the Solomon Islands, in the Libyan desert, in the mountains of the Caucausus, in the Norwegian fjords and in the vast fjord of air over all the cities. They were something and he was definitely a lug, as Suzy called him. He thought that maybe he would be better off in the armed forces. Maybe if he met the enemy head on with bayonet and bullet that would strip him of his stupid ideas? He felt that he had spent the whole day in a cave blacker than any dim-out, searching for a light that wasn’t there.
He circled his arm around Suzy’s waist, sighing. “Just to keep you from being knocked away.”
“What about Clair?” she said.
“I saw him. I saw Deputy Inspector Coombs — ” And as they inched north past the Paramount Building, the Concord Book Shop with its 49¢ fiction specials, the Astor with its women on all the stone stairs, he told them briefly whom he had seen, Hal Clair, Deputy Inspector Coombs, the secretaries of the anti-fascist groups who had shown him their collections of fascist literature, the Italian bar owners. “None of it much,” he concluded. “As for Clair,” he said challengingly, “He’s a great newspaper clipper. He ought to be teaching and not be the head of the Harlem Equality League.”
“You’ve only met him once,” Suzy reminded him.
“I’ve got a hunch on my first impressions — ”
“Miller, the clairvoyant,” she said.
“Clair looks like a white man but I don’t feel that he’s a colored man,” Sam said. “And that secretary of his, Marian Burrow! She’s got the looks of a chorine. Johnny, do you know anything about her?”
“No, Sam.”
“That set-up’s cockeyed somewheres. Now you two know how I feel anyway. No use keeping it to myself. I thought Clair’d be glad to have me but is he suspicious!”
“You’re still a cop to him,” Johnny said. “A cop on a leave of absence. But Sam, you know — Every time a man starts something new, he don’t feel right. He isn’t used to it. He’s worried — ”
“I’m worried, too,” Suzy said suddenly. “I’m worried about you, Sam.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“There’s plenty to worry about,” Johnny said. “You’re a marked man. No use pussyfooting. Even Butch said I ought to tell you to be careful — ”
Sam gritted his jaws. That was all Suzy needed to make his life miserable, this dumb broadcast. “Get an earful, Suzy.”
“Some of your ideas about women,” Suzy retorted, “go back to I don’t know when. I’ve got a right to know everything. And you’ve got to be careful.”
“Maybe one of those guys in the Italian bars is following me right now,” he teased her. “He could stab me and get lost in the crowd. The perfect murder.”
“Funny man. Sam, you’re going to be in Harlem for the next week or so?”
“What if I am?”
“Listen to his nasty tone,” Suzy said. “But you can’t scare me off, Sam.”
“That leaflet Sunday,” Johnny said, “just about begs somebody to wipe you out. And when the Negro papers come out this Thursday — ”
Suzy said determinedly. “Sam, you need me to keep an eye on you.”
Sam howled. “If you haven’t a sweet opinion of yourself.”
“I need a leave of absence myself,” Suzy said. “That’s just what I need. Tomorrow, I’m going to tell Mr. Hunter that I have to go away and take care of my grandma.”
He gaped at her. “You’re not serious?”
“Sure I’m serious.”
“And then what?” he demanded.
Innocently she repeated. “Then what? Why nothing, dear. I’ll see Mr. Clair and volunteer to help in the office while you’re there.”
“What!”
“Don’t bellow, Sammy. We can all hear you.”
“What do you intend to do?” he said.
“I’ve told you. I could type your notes or Clair’s notes and keep in touch — ”
“Who do you think you are, my watchdog, Suzy?”
“Don’t become insulting, Sammy.”
“Suzy, you’re balmy. That office isn’t keen on me! And you — ”
She patted him on the cheek. “If you’re going to be in Harlem so am I.”
“You can’t. I won’t have it.”
“No?”
“Johnny!” Sam exclaimed. “Maybe you can convince her she isn’t sensible.”
Johnny smiled, shaking his head as if to say: It’s between you two; then he said. “What’s sensible, anyway, Sam? You need all the help and all the friends you got. Isn’t that sensible?”
Sam glared at Suzy. He tightened his arm around her waist, lifted her off her feet.
“Let me down,” she buzzed at him. “Let me down. What’s that? An outlet for your emotions? Let me down.”
“I’ll let you down but do me a favor and not speak for awhile.”
Johnny laughed. “You sound like married folks. Sam, this Thursday, the day the Negro papers come out, Butch and me make our report to the union. We was wondering if you would like to speak to the boys?”
“Me?”
“We kind of thought it’d be kind of helpful to ease the tension, Sam. You see we got a lot of Negro members and if they could hear you, they’d go back home and pass it on to their friends — ”
“Nothing doing,” Sam said.
“Sam,” Suzy cried.
“Don’t Sam me. I’m not pounding my chest to anybody, not to unions or Vincent or anybody. When I dig up some information, I’ll see Vincent.”
“You look stubborn,” Suzy said. “Johnny could I attend that meeting? I’d like to hear the report.”
“My substitute,” Sam said sarcastically. “The original Priscilla Picket Line, herself.”
“And you’re the original dim-out.”
At the next corner, Johnny paused. “You folks’ll excuse me but I got to see Butch. He’s waiting to hear — ”
“Butch!” Sam groaned.
“Who’s Butch?” Suzy asked.
“He’s in the union with me,” Johnny said. “We’re on this committee together, you know. To try and get the different races to understand each other. Sam, I’ve been thinking that if we all work together we can do a lil good up there in Harlem. It’s — You know? It’s like we’re all getting into position to slap the face of a mean guy. That mean guy’s been around a long time. He was over at Grant’s awhile back. I could see’m looking me over, all set to knock me down. He was on Broadway, too, and he didn’t like seeing me with you, and with Suzy especially. He’s a mean guy and now we got a chance to slap his face hard. Goodnight, I’ll be seeing both of you.”
They watched him enter the subway kiosk on the corner. For a second he was outlined by the dim yellow light coming up out of the station, tall, thin, bareheaded, then he was gone as if sucked underground. “That’s why he looked so sad before,” Suzy said. “Oh, well, Sammy, Rome wasn’t built in a day as Mother is always saying.”
“Or in a year.”
“I said day. How about a bus ride? Nice spring night for a bus ride. I haven’t been on a bus since my first love affair with Charley Alderdyce back in Sunday School.”
He smiled, compelled to smile at her bubbling words. They walked east towards Fifth Avenue. Broad and black, Fifth spilled in front of them; in the traffic beacons, the thin red crosses of light directed the traffic. They waited for the crosses to turn green, then ran to the east corner and, laughing, waited for the bus.
“Suzy, you weren’t serious about Clair — ”
“I’m starting tomorrow. One week at Camp Clair, swimming, boating — ”
“Quit horsing around.”
“Think horses’ll come back with all the gas shortage? Nice spring night for horses, for all of God’s little creatures.”
“Yes, nice spring night.” He wanted to laugh.
“That’s just how I feel.”
“You, you,” he said.
The bus rolled up at them, braked to a stop and they climbed the spiral iron stairs to the open top, catwalking down the gangway between sailors and their girl friends, young newly married couples, high school petters, old women out for the spring air. They found an empty seat in the middle. She let go of his hand and slid in towards the rail. He sat down, putting his arm around her shoulders. The bus chugged forward, its great broad nose edging away from the sidewalk. Suzy snuggled closer to him, pillowing his free hand between both of her own hands. They sat that way, the wind in their hair and on their cheeks, for a long time like kids holding hands in a movie: that was what the bus was, a movie on wheels, all the night-time sights of the city dreamily floating before them. The avenue was even more mysterious in the war-time shadows; the shapes of the men and women on the sidewalks belonged perhaps to millionaires, to actresses; a tall woman in summer white gleamed like a moth in front of a window full of oil paintings. The bus hurled into the Sixties, past side-streets of old-fashioned stone residences that belonged to another New York, the great city of 1917. On their left, Central Park was a wilderness; the immense walls of the apartment houses on their right.
He said, “Suzy, I’m fond of you just the same.”
“Fond of me? What a tame expression.”
“I like you a lot.”
“Come again, brother.”
“Damn you, I love you.”
“A little more enthusiasm and you won’t be bad.”
“You’d try anybody’s patience though.”
“That’s swell.”
“What’s so swell about it?”
“What do you want? Some clinging wet mouse?”
“Sometimes I think I do.”
“No you don’t.”
“I wouldn’t be so all-fired dogmatic.”
“I’m sure of you in case you’re interested.”
“How sure?”
“All the way and then some.”
“You are?”
“Almost from the first time we met.”
“Who would’ve dreamed to see the day with you piling on the syrup.”
“Why not, you flat-footed G-man. It’s all ours.”
“What’s all ours?”
“Everything in life that’s any good.”
“Including the syrup?”
“Including everything.”
“It makes me think of the first time we met at that union dance when Rose introduced us. Remember?”
“I remember. What’s the gag line, wise guy?”
“You’d never seen me before and yet you looked me over like I was a freak and you made a crack, one of those typical Suzy cracks, when I asked you to dance.”
“What was it? Maybe I can use it again?”
“You said you would dance with me but you hoped I wouldn’t step all over your toes since I was a cop. Rose, of course, had to tell you I was a cop.”
“I’m waiting for the gag line.”
“The gag was that cops stepped on toes because they didn’t even respect women.”
“That’s not so hot. I must have been off form that night.” She pulled at his coat lapel. “Sam, you’ll take care of yourself?”
He was silent.
“Sam, promise.”
“I thought you’d taken that job over.”
“To some extent, my wonderful lug. But I can’t be with you every minute. Honest, honey, I’m awful worried.”
“Unworry yourself.”
“You should’ve gone to Councilman Vincent today.”
“Don’t spoil the bus ride.”
“I’ll sock you in the snoot. If you’d seen Vincent, he might’ve written an editorial in his paper about you and Harlem wouldn’t be hating you so much.”
“Wrong.”
“You’ll see Vincent tomorrow, Sam?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Nuisance, Deputy Inspector Coombs told me that Vincent and his committee are working like mad to suspend me. They want me brought up for homicide. They don’t even want me tried before the grand jury because they say the grand jury’ll only whitewash me.”
“You’ll see Vincent tomorrow?”
“Nope. I’m not crying to him I’m a good guy. When I round up the guys who slapped into the Italian bars or something like that I’ll see him.”
“You still can see him.”
“Be practical if you can. The dice’ve been thrown. Vincent’s after me.”
“You’re giving yourself a persecution complex.”
“I am, am I? Listen, sweetheart, don’t you think there are opportunists and demagogues mixed up with Vincent’s committee? Maybe they’ve started the boycott against the Italian bars themselves.”
“You know that isn’t so!”
“How do I know? How do I know that sacred committee hasn’t got its politicians who see in my case only a chance to go places?”
“You’ll find stinkers everywhere,” Suzy said quietly.
“Except among the unions and the Negroes.”
“Among the unions and among the Negroes. Negroes are people like anybody else.”
“Now you said something. That stuffed shirt Hal Clair.” He thought of Clair and Marian Burrow. “You ought to stay away from Clair’s place.”
“Don’t nag.”
“That’s hot. I’m the nag. See Clair and little Marian with those come-hither eyes. God help the Harlem Equality League with those two in charge. Meet them both. You’re all hepped about Negroes. You idealize them. Wait’ll you meet them in the flesh.”
“Sam, Clair and Marian are only two individuals. They’re not all the Negroes in Harlem. Even if Marian’s a dizzy kid, she isn’t all Negro girls, and Clair isn’t all Negro men even if he’s a stuffed shirt. Don’t you realize what you’re saying? You’re judging all Negroes by two individuals about whom you might be wrong. You’re talking exactly the way the fascists do.”
“Don’t give me the Party line. I like you better when you’re giving me your own line.”
“I’m not in the Party.”
“Okay, I give up. You and Butch Cashman are a pair. He talked me into going to the mass meeting and you’ll talk me into the Kremlin.”
“Honey, you stink.”
“Maybe.”
“You didn’t tell me Cashman talked you into it when I saw you last night. I thought you had decided all by yourself.”
“Why should I? I’ve got advisers, haven’t I?”
“You can say the stupidest things. I’ve been wondering?”
“About what this time?”
“Aren’t there Christian Fronters and other fascists in the Police Department?”
“How do I know?”
“Remember a few years ago when there was an investigation and nothing happened?”
“Well?”
“I wonder if some of those fascists kept you from resigning today?”
He said. “Are you serious? You are serious! You’re nuts. Nuts! Coombs is one of the finest men you could find anywhere and liberal — ”
“He isn’t the whole Department. Nothing did happen in that investigation a few years ago. Sam, listen to me. Don’t shrug your shoulders. Aren’t you limited by not resigning?”
“How?”
“Isn’t there a strong urge in you to follow Coombs’ advice and take things easy?”
“Because I don’t want to see Vincent just yet? I’ll see him when I’ve got something to see him with.”
“But why wait? The Peoples’ Advocate will be out Thursday. It’ll be full of pictures about the meeting.”
“I like publicity. And you think, you innocent babe, that they’ll kill the biggest story of the week for my sweet sake?”
“You don’t know until you try.”
“You won’t take my advice about the Harlem Equality League and I won’t take yours.”
“Sammy, why not do everything you can to lessen the feeling against you?”
“I am.”
“Darling,” she whispered. “I’m afraid something’ll happen to you.”
He felt her shudder under his arm. “Don’t be silly.”
“Resign, Sammy. Join the Army. Get out of Harlem.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I didn’t say it! I didn’t say it!”
Shaken, he groped for her lips and kissed her; the bus travelled uptown block after block and his lips stayed on her lips.
She pushed him away from her and he kissed her cheek fast. “Sammy, give a girl a chance to breathe.”
“Go on and breathe.”
“Thanks, generous.”
He laughed, inhaling the warm wind from the Hudson; they were on upper Riverside Drive and the dark river below was like a vein of coal; across the river on the shore, the lights of the factories were dim; high above the factories the tiny lights of moving cars appeared and disappeared glimmering like miners’ hats in a shaft.
“Sam.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got your fight right here in Harlem. I didn’t mean it about the Army.”
“Slacker.”
“On you jokes aren’t becoming,” she said.
“I know. I’m the serious type.”
“You know what I mean. The battlefields aren’t all over there.”
“Where are they then?”
“Don’t be so wise.”
“What do you say, Suzy? Let’s drop the discussion.”
They reached One Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Street and changed for the downtown bus. “I better get you home,” he said as they climbed another spiral stair to another seat in the darkness. “I wished we lived in the same place, Suzy.”
“So do I, darling.”
“I’ve known you five months. That’s a hell of a long time to be saying goodnight in hallways.” He kissed her on the ear. “Suzy,” he whispered. “How about getting married, me and you? What’re we waiting for? I said the same thing last month. What’re we waiting for?”
“I don’t know now.”
“Why only now?”
“I had the right answer last month but not now.”
“You mean you being the sole support of your mother? That’s just as true now.”
“Not only that. I thought I’d talk to mother some more.”
“About me being a Jew?”
“Five months is a short time for somebody like my mother. She’s just about catching her breath that we’re serious and that her only daughter’s in love with you, Sammy.”
“How long does she need? A lifetime?”
“Sam, I don’t know why we’re waiting. No, I don’t.”
His heart raced in him like a turbine and his blood roared in his veins and he kissed her on the lips and felt her shoulders underneath his hands and the drunken minute was over. “When’ll it be?” he said.
“Soon. Very soon.”
“We better get off or we’ll miss your block.” He pressed the button and the bus stopped on the downtown side of Riverside Drive. She walked ahead of him, a small girl with flowing hair black in his eyes. They cut east to West End Avenue and then over to Broadway with its hotels, cocktail bars and Childs’ restaurants and crossed the avenue into the long streets east of Broadway. She lived between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues in a block full of tenements, furnished rooming houses and scattered old-fashioned apartment houses. She unlocked the door of a big limestone and brick apartment lettered Rochambeau and he followed her into an antique lobby with a bust of Dante on a pedestal and a marble bench. He grabbed her to him and they rocked together in a long kiss. Her lips felt soft and spongy and moist to him. He stepped back and stared into her face. In the light of the overhead lamp, her face showed the long day’s work. Her grey eyes looked black and they never shifted from him and her lips were wide apart and she seemed inwardly absorbed, almost dreamy, as if waiting for him to make a decision for both of them. He pulled her body to him, tightened his arms as if he would never let her go and he felt as he had on the bus as if moving through a darkness towards springtime hills far beyond the last street and the last house in the city.
She said. “What a lug you are.” She was smiling.
“Why?”
“You proposed to me on the bus and at the same time you noticed when we came to my block.”
“Your block haunts me. You know, Suzy, after the hearing last Monday I walked and walked and I walked, without thinking of it, down Columbus Avenue.”
“We better not stay here,” she said. “Somebody’ll come in.”
“Goodnight — ”
“I didn’t mean for you to say goodnight.”
“What? Suzy — ”
“Let’s go.”
“Look,” he said and stopped.
“I know,” she said.
They climbed the tiled stairs to the third floor and stood in a tiled corridor with walls painted a greenish blue. All the locked doors were numbered in faded gilt and empty milk bottles stood on guard. “Look,” he said, reaching for her. Without waiting for him to pull her forward, she swayed towards him and into him and he gasped. He kissed her on the neck and then gently poked her round black hat from off her forehead. “Look,” he said.
“Darling.”
“I better go. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.” She seized his arm and they kissed again.
“No fooling, we’ll get married soon.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t either but — ”
“Don’t go.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Don’t be nuts.”
“I’m nuts about you.”
He trembled. “It’s good to know.”
“Don’t go.”
“Don’t make it tough for me.”
“I’m not trying to make it tough for you.”
“Suzy.”
“Suppose you were leaving for the Army?”
“I’m not in the Army. I’m not leaving.”
“We’d be together. We’d — we’d see all we could of each other, make all the love we could if you were leaving.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Suppose something happens to you?” She pressed her cheek against his chest and he heard her sob convulsively.
“Suzy.”
“I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go.” She looked at him and her eyes glittered and her voice had a hysterical sing-song tone. “I don’t want you to say goodnight. I don’t want to hear your shoes going down the corridor and down the stairs until I can’t hear your stupid old leather heels and run to the window and watch you on the sidewalk, always leaving me.”
“Look here, Suzy.”
“Sam, don’t leave me.”
“Your mother. All she’ll need! To know!”
“Mother’s sleeping. She won’t know. I’ll get you up in time. You’ll go before Mother wakes. Oh, damn you for making me think of you going.”
He took her hand and it seemed that this was the first time in his life that he had held her hand, or known her hand, small and warm and clinging. And he thought that it was no use talking any more for the time for talking and saying goodnight was over between them and suppose something did happen to him in Harlem. He looked at her steadily and this was the first time in his life that he had so seen her, as if the tin latticework of wisecracks had melted away and never been and all that was clear to the eye was her love for him. She was beautiful to him then in her awry black hat, her hair fluffing over her forehead, in her black dress with the monogrammed “S” that now was truly both their names, her face dreamy as it had been downstairs in the lobby but also tense with passion, her lips protruding a little and her face flushed so that her skin seemed alive, so alive, her livingness poured into him and a vision of her body pounded in him, white and sweet-meated, and he felt dizzy.
“Come,” he said.
Without another word they walked to her door. She took the key out of her pocketbook and smiled at him. “Lug,” she said.
“You think your mother’ll be up?”
“No. You tiptoe down the corridor into the living room.” She inserted the key, unlocked the door, pushed it open. The corridor was a black square in his eyes. She took his hand and led him into the living-room. “Stay here,” she whispered and kissed him. He hugged her and she seemed to collapse against him and then she was squirming out of his grip. She left him and he listened to her, sure-footed in the darkness. Light exploded. He saw Suzy at a maple end table at the head of the studio couch. On the end table, a lamp with a maple base and a parchment shade was glowing. Her mother had already made up the studio couch for sleeping. The pillow shone in his eyes like a mound of snow. She smiled at him and hurried out of the living room. He watched her until she was gone and then tiptoed over to the windows. Both windows were open and he looked out on the street. Singing tipsy voices drifted up to him and he knew that they belonged to the furnished roomers staggering home from the taverns on Columbus Avenue. Suddenly, he yanked down the window shades, one after another, and sat down in the green soft chair opposite the studio couch and the white pillow. He thought he had pulled down the shades for no reason at all. In this street, there were no neighbors; nobody cared what anybody did. In the furnished rooms were cafeteria girls and machinists and laborers; in the tenements the large families; it was a street like a train onto which people were always coming and going and only a few families like the Buckles lingered on in the shabby genteel apartment houses. Restlessly, aching for Suzy to return to him, his eyes roamed about her room. Under the end table, he noticed a pile of cheap white paper magazines, the radical weeklies she was always reading. Near the lamp were a few newspapers. He crossed over and picked up the top newspaper: REDS KILL 12,000 NAZIS. God, he thought, dropping the paper and returning to the soft chair. He sank into its depths and glared at the points of his shoes. His eyes again shifted to the magazines but he didn’t feel like reading about the war and the fascists and copperheads in the land. He wanted Suzy to come back to him. He repeated her name to himself over and over. He tried variations: Soozy, Suzy, Sussy, Soo-zy. He heard the shower in the bathroom and a picture of Suzy sloshing water on her naked body made him tremble. He wondered how he would be able to use the bedroom. He would be in the bathroom, washing and the door would open and Mrs. Buckles in a nightgown would come in and what would he say then. “How do you do Mrs. Buckles? I’ve come to make love to Suzy and you’re going to be my mother-in-law. You see I’m liable to get hurt or killed next week so I hope you don’t mind.” He grinned in a sick way. And what would Mrs. Buckles say? She would hold herself straight and her eyes would be hard behind her glasses and she would say, “I might have expected something of this sort from one of your kind.” Oh, God, Sam thought; come on back Suzy. He dug out his pack of cigarettes, smoked one through and was lighting a second from the coal of the first when Suzy returned. She was smiling as when she had left him but now she wasn’t in the black trim dress and the black lizard-skin shoes. She was wearing green pyjamas and she was wide awake, her face glistening from hot water and soap, and it was morning, bright early morning, that was also and at the same time night, in her eyes. He extinguished the cigarette in an ash tray and leaped out of the chair. Her hair was brushed back straight from her forehead and she seemed to flow towards him like a wave. He held her tight and felt her breasts flatten against his chest and remembered how he had pressed them on the bus ride but they were free now, out of slip and dress, and the sensation that he had already felt several times that night, of having never seen her before, hummed through him and he touched her wide cheekbone and said, “Hello.”
She pushed him away. “Get washed. I’ve left the light on in the bathroom. One minute.” She laughed a little. “Take your shoes off first. Those leather heels,” she giggled and kissed him.
He took off his shoes and rushed out of the living room to the bathroom. He closed the door. The old-fashioned tub, high off the floor on four legs shaped like lions paws, reminded him of Mrs. Buckles. Sleep on, old woman, he thought madly. He inhaled the scent of Suzy’s powder and thought: Sleep on for I love her, old woman.
Suzy was under sheet and blanket when he came back. “Come here,” she said, “and I’ll put the light out.” He walked over to the couch and her hands slid up out of the green full pyjama sleeves and she clasped him around the neck. “You put out the light,” she whispered.
Blackness. He sat on the edge of the studio couch and felt her body against his thigh. He got out of his clothes and piled them on the floor and slid under the sheet. His hands found her and he said, “I used your towel in the bathroom.” He felt her lips find his and they locked together. “Sam,” she said. “You won’t take any chances?” “What do you mean?” he said. “I’ve taken precautions.” “I don’t mean that.” “Oh, Harlem.” “Yes, Harlem. You won’t take any chances?” “No.” Her body moved closer into his body and she said in a shaking voice, “You’ll be careful, darling?” “Sure.” “You will?” “Sure, don’t worry, I love you.” “I love you.” “When’ll we get married?” “Soon,” and with a flicker of humor she added, “Soon as you help me out of these pyjamas.” Fumbling, he helped her and then crushed her between his arms, his lips on her neck. “I love you,” he whispered, his lips on her neck. “It came to me tonight, next week — I’ll need a week to break it to mother about us getting married,” she murmured. “Wait’ll she meets my folks,” Sam said laughing.
They smothered their laughter, kissed and between their lips there was nothing any more, no families, no problems, and he kissed her eyelids and kissed her breasts and his hands stroked down the line of her waist and out on the broadening hips, and his lips and his hands weren’t enough to feel and to hold all the beauty of her. His head was burning as if there were a flame inside his head and the flame was in his lips and surged into the ends of his ten fingers, and his lips and his hands weren’t enough for feeling and holding the soft curve of her neck and the round swell of her belly and the angle of her knee and the coolness of her arms and the warmth of her thighs. His breath fanned in and out, and his lips stayed on her burning hot lips and he lifted his body onto her body, trying to hold all of her under him and within him, to feel and to hold forever, and he swelled with passion and the burning seized him and he was fire leaping into a burning darkness and heard her moaning and clutching him with slipping hands and he descended into her, deep into her as if he had climbed slowly and endlessly up into some automatic elevator with her, an elevator a thousand stories high and the cables had snapped and he was falling, falling, falling, a pole of fire down through the shaft and the shaft was on fire, faster, faster, faster, and she was with him and down they were falling together, one together, through the burning shaft, through the endlessness forever with her and with her, with her …
They lay together quietly for a long time, her head in the crook of his arm.
“I better go soon, Suzy. It must be near dawn.”
She bit playfully at his ear. “You heel, you can’t leave me like this. Oh, God, if I think of those leather heels of yours I’ll burst.”
He smiled. “But your mother.”
“A fine time to think of my mother.” Her voice was full of laughing even though it was only a whisper. “A fine time to think of my mother. A fine time to — ” She clutched her mouth with her hand and shook with suppressed laughter. “A fine — ”
“You’re crazy,” he whispered and suddenly caught her fit. He buried his mouth in the pillow.
“Sam.”
“Stop,” he choked, his sides splitting. “St — ”
“The leather heels.”
“St — stop,” he pleaded.
“Then go to sleep.”
“Who’ll wake me?”
“I will. I promise.” She kissed him swiftly. “Sam, I promise,” she said and her voice was serious and intense and eager.
“Oh, I promise, Sam.”