The young man at the table of the station lunch room knew neither the name nor the location of the town where he was, and he had no knowledge of the hour more exact than that it was some time between midnight and morning. He realized that he must already be in the south, but that there were many more hours journeying before he would reach home. For a long time he had sat at the table over a half finished bottle of beer, relaxed to a gangling position – with his thighs fallen loose apart and with one foot stepping on the other ankle. His hair needed cutting and hung down softly ragged over his forehead and his expression as he stared down at the table was absorbed, but mobile and quick to change with his shifting thoughts. The face was lean and suggestive of restlessness and a certain innocent, naked questioning. On the floor beside the boy were two suitcases and a packing box, each tagged neatly with a card on which was type-written his name – Andrew Leander, and an address in one of the larger towns in Georgia.
He had come into the place in a drunken turmoil, caused partly by the swallows of corn a man on the bus had offered him, mostly by a surge of expectancy that had come to him during the last few hours of travelling. And that feeling was not unaccountable. Three years before, when he was seventeen years old, the boy had left home in an inner quandary of violence, a gawky wanderer going with fear into the unknown, expecting never to come back. And now after these three years he was returning.
Sitting at the table in the lunch room of that little nameless town, Andrew had become more calm. All during the time of his absence he had put away thoughts of his home town and his family – of his Dad and his sisters, Sara and Mick, and of the coloured girl Vitalis, who worked for them. But as he sat with his beer (so completely a stranger that it was as though he were magically suspended from the very earth) the memories of all of them at home revolved inside him with the clarity of a reel of films – sometimes precise and patterned, again in a chaos of disorder.
And there was one little episode that kept recurring again and again in his mind, although until that night he had not thought of it in years. It was about the time he and his sister made a glider in the back yard, and perhaps he kept remembering it because the things he had felt at that time were so much like the expectancy this journey now brought.
At that time they had all been kids and at the age when all the new things they learned about on the radio and in books and at the movies could set them wild with eagerness. He had been thirteen, Sara a year younger, and little Mick (she didn’t count in things like this) was still in kindergarten. He and Sara had read about gliders in a science magazine in the school library and immediately they began to build one in their back yard. (They began to build it one afternoon in the middle of the week and by Saturday they had worked so hard that it was almost finished.) The article had not given any exact directions for making the glider; they had had to go by the way they imagined it should be and to use whatever materials they could find. Vitalis would not give them a sheet to cover the wings so they had to cut up his canvas camping tent to use instead. For the frame they used some bamboo sticks and some light wood they snitched from the carpenters who were building a garage up on the next block. When it was finished the glider was not very big, and seemed very different from the ones they had seen in the movies – but he and Sara kept telling each other that it was just as good and that there was nothing to keep their ship from flight.
That Saturday was a time that none of them would ever forget. The sky was a deep, blazing blue, the colour of gas flames, and at times there was a thick and sultry breeze. All morning he and Sara stayed out in the hot sun of the back yard working. Her face was strained and pale with excitement and her full, almost sullen lips were red and dry as though from a fever. She kept running back and forth to get things she thought they might need, her thin legs overgrown and clumsy, her damp hair streaming out behind her shoulders. Little Mick hung around the back steps, watching. It seemed to him then that they were as different as any sisters could be. Mick sat quietly, her hands on her fat little knees, not saying much but gazing at everything they did with a wondering look to her face and with her little mouth softly open. Even Vitalis was out there with them most of the time. She didn’t know whether to believe in it or not. She was a nervous, light-coloured girl and there was something about the glider that excited her as much as it did the rest of them – and that scared her too. As she watched them her fingers kept fooling with her red earrings or picking at her swollen quivering lips.
They all felt that there was something wild about that day. It was like they were shut off from all other people in the world and nothing mattered except the four of them planning and working out in the quiet, sun-baked yard. It was as though they had never wanted anything except this glider and its flight from the earth up toward the hot blue sky.
It was the launching that gave them the most worry. He kept saying to Sara: ‘We ought to have a car to hitch it to because that’s the way the real flyers get them up. Or else one of those elastic ropes like they described in the magazine.’
But beside their garage was a tall pine tree, with the limbs growing high and stretching out almost as far as the house. From one of these branches hung a swing and it was from this they intended to make their start. He and Sara took out the board seat and put in its place a larger plank. And it was from the start that the swing would give them that they would be launched.
Vitalis felt like she ought to be responsible and she was afraid. ‘I have been having this here queer feeling all day.’
There was a hot slow breeze and from the top of the pine came a gentle soughing. She held up her hands to feel the wind and stood for a moment looking at the sky – intent as some savage rapt in prayer.
‘You all think just because your mother ain’t living that you don’t have to mind nobody. Why don’t you wait till your Daddy come home and ask him? I been having this here feeling all day that something bad ghy happen from that thing.’
‘Hush,’ said Sara.
‘I know it ain’t no real airplane even if it do have them big wings made out of a old torn up tent. And I know you just as human as I is. And your head just as easy to bust.’
But no matter what she said Vitalis believed in the glider as much as any of them. When she was in the kitchen they could see her come to the window every few minutes and stare out at them, her broad nose pressed to the glass, her dark face quivering.
By the time they were finished the sun was almost down. The sky had blanched to a pale jade colour and the breeze that had been blowing most of the day seemed cooler and stronger to them. The yard was very quiet and neither he nor Sara said anything or looked at each other as they tensely balanced the glider on the swing. They had already argued about who would be the one to go up first and he had won. They called Vitalis out from the house and told her to help Sara give the final push and when she did not want to they said they would call Chandler West or some other kid in the neighbourhood so she might as well be the one. Little Mick got up from the steps where she had been looking at them all day long and watched him step carefully up into the swing and squat down on the frame of the glider, gripping the wood with the rubber soles of his sneakers.
‘Do you think you’ll go as far as Atlanta or Cleveland?’ she asked. Cleveland was the place where their cousin lived and that was how she knew the name.
It seemed to him as he crouched in there trying to keep his balance that already he was leaving the ground. He could feel his heart beating almost in his throat and his hands were shaking.
Vitalis said: ‘And even if this slow little wind do carry you up in the air, what you ghy do then? Is you just ghy fly around up there all night like you is an angel?’
‘Will you be back in time for supper, Drew?’ Mick asked.
Sara looked like she didn’t hear anything that was said. There were drops of sweat on her forehead and he could hear her breath coming quick and shallow. She and Vitalis each took a rope of the swing and pulled with all their strength. Even little Mick helped them balance the glider. It seemed like it took them hours to hoist him up as far as their head while he waited, crouched tensely, with his jaw stiff and his eyes half closed. During that moment he thought of himself soaring up and up into the cool blue sky and the joy of it was such as he never felt before.
Then came the part that afterward was the hardest to understand. As soon as the glider left the swing it crashed and he fell so hard that for a long time his stomach moved round and round in dizzy turns and he felt like someone was standing on his chest so that he could not breathe. But for some reason that did not matter at all. He got up from the ground and it was as though he would not let himself believe what had happened. He had not fallen on the glider and it was not hurt except for a little tear in the wing. He undid his belt buckle and tried to take a deep breath. He and Sara did not talk but kept themselves busy getting ready for the next take-off. And the queer thing was that they both knew that this second trial would be just like the first and that their glider would not fly. In a part of them they knew this but there was something that would not let them think about it – the wanting and the excitement that would not let them be quiet or stop to reason.
Vitalis was different and her voice went up high and sing song. ‘Here Andrew done almost bust hisself wide open and still you all ghy keep on with this thing. Time you all is near bout twenty-five and old as I is you’ll learn some sense.’
Even Mick began to talk. She was always a quiet kid and hadn’t said more than ten words all the time she had been hanging around. That was the way she always was. She just looked with her little mouth half open and seemed to wonder about and take in everything you did or said without trying to answer. ‘When I’m twelve years old and a big girl I’m going to fly and I’m not going to fall. You just wait and see.’
‘Quit your talking like that,’ Vitalis said. She did not want to watch them so she went into the house. Now and then they could see her dark face peering out at them from the kitchen window. He had to launch Sara by himself.
When she got into the glider it was almost dark. She crashed even worse than he did but she did not act like she was hurt and at first he did not notice the bump over her eye and the long bloody smear on her knee where the skin had scraped off. The glider was not even damaged much this time and it was like they were really wild as Vitalis made them out to be. ‘Just one more time I’m going to try,’ Sara said. ‘It keeps sticking to the seat and when I fix that its just got to go up.’ She ran into the house, stepping light on the leg she had hurt, and came back with a hunk of butter on a piece of waxed bread wrapper to grease the swing. Vitalis’s high singing voice called out to them from the kitchen but no one answered.
After the third time it was all over. He let Sara go because he was too heavy for her to launch. Their glider was smashed so you wouldn’t know what it was and he had to help Sara get up from the ground this time. Her eye was swollen and she looked sick. She stood with her weight on one foot and when she pulled up her skirt to show him a big bruise on her thigh, her leg was trembling so that she almost lost her balance. Everything was over and he felt dead and empty inside.
It was almost dark and they stood there for a while just looking at each other. Mick still sat on the steps watching them with a scared look and not saying anything. Their faces were white in the half-darkness and the smells of supper from the kitchen were strong in the hot still air. It was very quiet and again it seemed that lonely feeling came to him like they were the only people in the world.
Finally, Sara said: ‘I don’t care. I’m glad anyway even if it didn’t work. I’d rather for it to be like it is now than not to have tried to build it. I don’t care.’
He broke off a piece of the pine bark and looked at Vitalis moving around in the soft yellow light of the kitchen.
‘It ought to have worked though. It ought to have flown. I just can’t see why it didn’t.’
In the dark sky there was a white star shining. Very slowly they walked across the yard toward their back steps and they were glad that their faces were half secret in the darkness. Quietly they went into the house and after that Vitalis was the only one who ever spoke of what had happened on that day.
The young man finished his beer on the table and motioned to the sleepy waiter to bring him another. All at once he decided not to take the next bus, but to stay in this strange town until morning. He half closed his eyes to shut out the crude light, the few weary travellers waiting at the tables, the dirty checked cloth before him.
It seemed to him that no one had ever felt just as he did. The past, the seventeen years of his life when he was at home, was before him like a dark and complex arabesque. But it was not a pattern to be comprehended at a glance, being more like a musical work that unfolds contrapuntally voice by voice and cannot be understood until after the time that it takes to reproduce it. It took shape in a vague design, less composed of events than of emotions. The last three years in New York did not enter into this pattern at all and were no more than a dark background to reflect for the moment the clarity of what had passed before. And through all this, in counterpart to the interwoven feelings, there was music in his mind.
Music had always meant a lot to him and Sara. Long ago, before Mick was even born and when their mother was still living, they would blow together on combs wrapped in toilet paper. Later there were harps from the ten cent store and the sad wordless songs that coloured people sang. Then Sara began to take music lessons and although she didn’t like either her teacher or the pieces she was given, she stuck to her practising pretty well. She liked to pick out the jazz songs she heard or just to sit at the piano, playing aimless notes that weren’t music at all.
He was about twelve when the family got a radio and after that things began to change. They began to dial to symphony orchestras and programmes that were very different from the ones they had listened to before. In a way this music was strange to them and again it was like something they had been waiting for all of their lives. Then their Dad gave them a portable Victrola one Christmas and some Italian opera records. Over and over they would wind up their Victrola and finally they wore the records out – there began to be scratching noises in the music and the singers sounded like they were holding their noses. The next year they got some Wagner and Beethoven.
All of that was before the time when Sara tried to run away from home. Because they lived in the same house and were together so much he was slow to notice the way she was changing. Of course she was growing very fast and couldn’t wear a dress two months before her wrists would be showing and the skirt would be shorter than her bony knees – but that wasn’t what it was. She reminded him of someone who had been sleepily stumbling through a dark room when a light was turned on. Often there was a lost, dazed look about her face that was hard to understand.
She would throw herself into first one thing and then another. For a while there were movies. She went to the show every Saturday with him and Chandler West and the rest of the kids, but when it was over and they had seen everything through she wouldn’t come out with them but would stay on in the movie until almost dark. She always started looking at the picture as soon as she passed the ticket man and would stumble down the aisle without ever looking at the seats until she had almost reached the screen – then she would sit on about the third row with her neck bent back and her mouth not quite closed. Even after she had seen everything through twice she would keep turning back to look as she walked out of the show so that she would bump into people and was almost like somebody drunk. On week days she would save all but a dime of her lunch money and buy movie magazines. She had the pictures of Clive Brook and four or five other stars tacked up on the wall of her room and when she would go to the drug store to buy the magazines she would get a chocolate milk and look through all they had, then buy the ones with the most in them about the stars she liked. Movies were all she cared about for about three months. Then all of a sudden that was over and she didn’t even go to the show anymore on Saturdays.
Then there was the Girl Scout Camp she and the girls she knew were going on, out at a lake about twenty miles from town. That was all she talked about the month beforehand. She would priss around in front of the mirror in the khaki shorts and boy’s shirts they were supposed to have, her hair slicked back close to her head, thinking it was grand to try to act like a boy. But after she had been on the camp just four days he came in one afternoon and found her playing the Victrola. She had made one of the counsellors bring her home and she looked all done in. She said all they did was swim and run races and shoot bows and arrows. And there weren’t any mattresses on the cots and at night there were mosquitoes and she had growing pains in her legs and couldn’t sleep. ‘I just ran and ran and then lay awake in the dark all night,’ she kept saying. ‘That’s all there was to it.’ He laughed at her, but when she started crying – not in the way kids like Mick bawled but slowly and unsobbing – it was almost like he was part of her and crying, too. For a long time they sat on the floor together, playing their records. They were always a lot closer than most brothers and sisters.
Music to them was something like the glider should have been. But it wasn’t sudden like that and it didn’t let them down. Maybe it was like whiskey was to their Dad. They knew it was something that would stay with them always.
Sara played the piano more and more after she got to high school. She didn’t like it there any more than he did and sometimes she would even worry him into writing excuses for her and signing their Dad’s name. The first term she got seven bad cards. Their Dad never knew what to do about Sara and whenever she did something wrong he would just clear his throat and look at her in an embarrassed way like he didn’t know how to say what was in his mind. Sara looked like pictures of their mother and he loved her a lot – but it was in a funny sort of timid way. He didn’t fuss at all about the bad cards. She was just twelve and that was young to be in high school anyway.
There is a time when everybody wants to run away – no matter how well they get along with their family. They feel they have to leave because of something they have done, or something they want to do, or maybe they don’t know why it is they run away. Maybe it is a kind of slow hunger that makes them feel like they have to get out and go in search of something. He ran away from home once when he was eleven. A girl on the next block took her money out of the school savings bank and got a bus to Hollywood because the actress she had a crush on answered one of her letters and said that if she was ever in California to drop in and see her and swim in her swimming pool. Her folks couldn’t get in touch with her for ten days and then her mother went out to Hollywood to bring her back. She had swum in the actress’s pool and was trying to get a job in the movies. She was not sorry to come back home. Even Chandler West who was always slow and dumb tried to run away. Although Chandler had lived across the street from them all their lives there was something about him no one could even understand. Even as little kids he and Sara felt that. It happened after Chandler had failed all his subjects at school, most of them for the second time. He said afterward that he wanted to build a hut up in the Canadian woods and live there by himself as a trapper. He was too dumb to hitch hike and he just kept walking toward the north until finally he was arrested for sleeping in a ditch and sent home. His mother had almost gone crazy and while he was gone her eyes were wild and like an animal’s. You would think that Chandler was the only person that she had ever loved. And maybe it was from her that he was running away, too.
So there was nothing very peculiar about what Sara did – that is unless you were a grown person like their Dad who just didn’t understand things like that. There wasn’t any real reason for her wanting to leave. It was just the way she had begun to feel in the last year. Maybe music had something to do with it. Or it might have been because she had grown so much and just didn’t know what to do with herself.
It happened on her thirteenth birthday and it was Monday morning. Vitalis had the breakfast table fixed nice with flowers and a new table cloth. Sara didn’t seem any different that morning from any other time. But suddenly as she was eating her grits she saw a kinky hair on her plate and she burst out crying. Vitalis’s feelings were hurt because she had tried to have breakfast so nice that morning. Sara grabbed her school books and went out the door. She said she wasn’t mad with anybody about anything but that she was leaving home for good. He knew she was just talking and would stay away until school was out. If it hadn’t been for Vitalis their Dad would never have known about it. Sara went up the street running and when she came to the vacant lot at the corner she threw all her school books in the high grass there. When we went to pick them up there were papers scattered everywhere in the wind – homework and funny things she had drawn in her tablet.
Vitalis phoned their Dad who had already gone to work and he came home in the automobile. He was very worried and serious. He kept pulling his lower lip tight against his teeth and clearing his throat. All three of them got in the automobile to go and find her. The rest would have been funny if you hadn’t been mixed up in it. They found her after about half an hour – walking down the road between high school and downtown. But when their Dad blew the horn she wouldn’t get in the car, or even look around at them. She just kept going with her head in the air and her pleated skirt switching above her skinny knees. Their Dad had never been so nervous and mad. He couldn’t get out and chase a girl down the street and so he had to just creep the car along behind her and blow the horn. They passed kids going to school who stared and giggled and it was awful. He was madder with Sara than their Dad. If they had had a closed car he would have leaned back and hid his face. But it was a Model T Ford and there wasn’t anything to do but shuffle his feet and try to look like he didn’t care.
After a while she gave up and got in the car. Their Dad didn’t know what to say and all of them were stiff and quiet. Sara was shamed and sad. She tried to cover it up by humming to herself in a don’t-care way. They got out quietly at the high school. But that wasn’t the end.
The next month Uncle Jim, who was kin to them on their mother’s side, came down from Detroit on the way to spend his vacation in Florida. Aunt Esther, his wife, was with him. She was a Jew and played the violin. Both of them had always liked Sara a lot – and in their Christmas boxes her present was always better than his or Mick’s. They didn’t have any children and there was something about them that was different from most married people. The first night they sat up very late with their Dad and maybe he told them all about Sara. Anyway, before they left, their Dad asked Sara how she would like to go to school a year in Detroit and live with them. Right away she said that she would like it – she had never been further away from home than Atlanta and she wanted to sleep on a train and live in a strange place and see snow in the winter time.
It happened so quickly that he could not get it into his head. He had not thought about the time when any of them would ever be away for long. He knew their Dad felt Sara was growing to the age where maybe she needed somebody who was at home more than he was. And the climate might do her good in Detroit and they didn’t have many kinfolks. Before they were born Uncle Jim had lived at their house a year – when he was still young and before he left for the north. But still he could not understand their Dad’s letting her go. She left in a week – because the school term had only been going a month and they didn’t want to waste more time. It was so sudden that it didn’t give him time to think. She was to be gone for ten months and that seemed almost as long as forever. He did not know that it would be almost twice that time before he would again see her. He felt dazed and it was like a dream when they said goodbye.
That winter the house was a lonesome place. Mick was too little to think about anything but eating and sleeping and drawing on coloured paper at kindergarten. When he would come in from school all the rooms seemed quiet and more than empty. Only in the kitchen was it any different and there Vitalis was always cooking and singing to herself and it was warm and full of good smells and life. If he did not go out he would usually hang around there and watch her and they would talk while she fixed him something to eat. She knew about the lonesome feeling and was good to him.
Most afternoons he was out with Chandler West and the rest of the gang of boys who were sophomores at high school. They had a club and a scrub football team. The vacant lot on the corner of the block was sold and the buyer began to build a house. When the carpenters and bricklayers left in the late afternoon the gang would climb up on the roof and run through the naked incompleted rooms. It was strange the way he felt about this house. Every afternoon he would take off his shoes and socks so he wouldn’t slip and climb to the sharp pointed top of the roof. Then he would stand there, holding his hands out for balance and look around at all that lay below him or at the pale twilight sky. From underneath the boys would be scuffling together and calling out to each other – their voices were changing and the empty rooms made long drawn echoes, so that the sounds seemed not human and unrelated to words.
Standing there alone on the roof he always felt he had to shout out – but he did not know what it was he wanted to say. It seemed like if he could put this thing into words he would no longer be a boy with big rough bare feet and hands that hung down clumsy from the outgrown sleeves of his lumberjack. He would be a great man, a kind of God, and what he called out would make things that bothered him and all other people plain and simple. His voice would be great and like music and men and women would come out of their houses and listen to him and because they knew that what he said was true they would all be like one person and would understand everything in the world. But no matter how big this feeling was he could never put any of it into words. He would balance there choked and ready to burst and if his voice had not been squeaky and changeing he would have tried to yell out the music of one of their Wagner records. He could do nothing. And when the rest of the gang would come out from the house and look up at him he felt a sudden panic, as though his corduroy pants had dropped from him. To cover up his nakedness he would yell something silly like Friends Romans Countrymen or Shake-Spear Kick Him In The Rear and then he would climb down feeling empty and shamed and more lonesome than anybody else in the world.
On Saturday mornings he worked down at his Dad’s store. This was a long narrow jeweller’s shop in the middle of one of the main business blocks downtown. Down the length of the place was a bright glass showcase with the sections displaying stones and silver. His Dad’s watchmaking bench was in the very front of the shop, looking out on the front window and the street. Day after day he would sit there over his work – a large man, more than six feet tall, and with hands that at first looked too big for their delicate work. But after you watched his Dad awhile that first feeling changed. People who noticed his hands always wanted to stare at them – they were fat and seemed without bone or muscles and the skin, darkened with acids, was smooth as old silk. His hands did not seem to belong to the rest of him, to his bent broad back and his stained muscular neck. When he worked at a hard job his whole face would show it. The eye that wore his jeweller’s glass would stare down round and intent and distorted while the other was squinted almost shut. His whole big face looked crooked and his mouth gaped open with strain. Although when he was not busy he liked to stare out at the heads and shoulders of the people passing on the street, he never glanced at them while he was at work.
At the store his Dad usually gave him odd jobs such as that of polishing silverware or running errands. Sometimes he cleaned watchsprings with a brush soaked in gasoline. Occasionally if there were several customers in the place and the salesgirl was busy he would awkwardly stand behind the counter and try to make a sale. But most of the time there was nothing much for him to do except hang around. He hated staying at the store on Saturdays because he could always think of so many other things he wanted to do. There were long stretches when the store would be very quiet – with only the droning ticks of the watches or the echoing sounds of a clock striking.
On the days when Harry Minowitz was there this was different. Harry took in the extra work of two or three jewellers in the town and his Dad let him use the bench at the back of the store in exchange for certain jobs. There was nothing that Harry didn’t know about even the finest of watch mechanics and because of this (and for other reasons too) he had the nickname of ‘The Wizard’. His Dad didn’t like Jews because there were a couple in town who were slick as grease and bad on other jewellers’ business. So it was funny the way he depended on Harry.
Harry was small and pale and he always seemed tired. His nose was large for his peaked face and next to his eyes it was the first thing you noticed. Perhaps that was because he had the habit of slowly rubbing it with his thumb and second finger when he was thinking, gently feeling the hump on it and pressing down the tip. When he was in doubt about a question put to him he would not shrug or shake his head – but slowly turn his slender hands palm upward and suck in his hollow cheeks. Usually a cigarette drooped from his mouth and his thin lips seemed too relaxed to hold it. His dark eyes had a way of staring sharply at a person, then the lids would suddenly droop down as though he understood everything and was still bored. At the same time there was a certain jauntiness about him. His clothes were dapper and he wore a stiff derby hat at an angle on the back of his head. Nothing could ever surprise Harry, but in his own quiet way he could always laugh at everything, even himself. He had come to the town ten years before and he lived alone in a small room on one of the overcrowded streets down by the river. Though he seemed to know half the people in the town by their names and faces he had few friends and was a solitary man.
During the winter after Sara left when Andrew worked at the store every Saturday he liked to watch Harry and think about him. There was a time when he would rather have been noticed and admired by him than any other person. He had never tried to ape his Dad like some boys did. But there was something sure and nonchalant about Harry that seemed wonderful to him. He had lived in cities like Los Angeles and New York and he knew languages and people that were strange to men like his Dad. He wanted to be good friends with Harry but he didn’t know how to go about it. When they were together something made him talk loud and hold his face stiff and call grown men by their last names without the Mister. Then he would be embarrassed, stumble over his big feet and get in everybody’s way. He felt that Harry saw through all of this and was laughing. This made him mad. There were times when if Minowitz hadn’t been so old he would have picked a fight with him and tried to bash his ears in. But although Harry looked like he might be any age he knew that he must be around thirty – and a nearly six foot tall boy of fourteen couldn’t fight with a smaller man who was that much older.
Then one morning Harry brought ‘the dolls’ to the store. That was the name somebody gave to the set of chessmen he had worked on for ten years. At first it was a surprise to realize that even Harry could be a crank about something – he had known that he liked chess and owned a fine set of pieces, but that was all. He learned that Harry would go anywhere to find a partner who could give him a good game. And next to playing he liked to just fondle and work with these little doll-like men. They had been carved years ago by a friend of his father – out of ebony and some light hard wood. Some of the pieces had shrunken little Chinese faces and all of the parts were curious and beautiful. For years Harry had worked in his spare time to inlay this set with chased gold.
It was these chessmen that made them friends. When Harry saw how interested he was he began to tell him about the work and also to explain the moves in a chess game. Within a few weeks he learned how to play a fair game for a beginner. And after that he and Harry would play together often on Saturdays in the back of the store. He got so that even at night when he couldn’t sleep he would think about chess. He hadn’t thought that he could ever like a game so much.
Sometimes Harry would have him up to his place for an evening. The room he lived in was very neat and bare. They would sit silently over a little card table, going through the game without a word. As Harry played his face was as pale and frozen looking as one of his little carved pieces – only his sharp black eyebrows moved and his fingers as he slowly rubbed his nose. The first few times he left as soon as the games were over because he was afraid Harry might get tired of him if he stayed longer and think he was just a boring kid. But before he knew it all that was changed and they would talk sometimes until late at night. There were times when he would feel almost like a drunk man and try to put into words all the things he had kept stored up for a long time. He would talk and talk until he was breathless and his cheeks burned – about the things he wanted to do and see and make up his mind about. Harry listened with his head cocked to one side and his unsurprised silence made what he wanted to say come faster and even more clearly than he had thought it.
Harry was always quiet, but the things he did mention suggested more than he ever said. He had a younger brother named Baruch who was a pianist studying in New York. The way he would speak of his brother showed that he cared more about him than he did anyone else. Andrew tried to imagine Baruch – and in his mind he was bigger and surer and knew more than any of the kids in his gang. Often when he thought of this boy there was a sad longing feeling because they didn’t know each other. Harry had other brothers – one who had a cigarette shop in Cincinnati, and another who was a piano tuner. You could tell he was close to all his family. But this Baruch was his favourite.
Sometimes when he would hurry down the dark streets on the way home he would feel a peculiar quiver of fear inside him. He didn’t know why. It was like he had given all he had to a stranger who might cheat him. He wanted to run run run through the dark streets without stopping. Once when this happened he stopped on a corner and leaned against the lamp post and began to try to remember exactly what he had said. A panic came over him because it seemed that the thing he had tried to tell was too naked. He didn’t know why this was so. The words jangled in his head and mocked him.
‘Don’t you ever hate being yourself? I mean like the times when you wake up suddenly and say I am I and you feel smothered. It’s like everything you do and think about is at loose ends and nothing fits together. There ought to be a time when you see everything like you’re looking through a periscope. A kind of a – colossal periscope where nothing is left out and everything in the world fits in with every other thing. And no matter what happens after that it won’t – won’t stick out like a sore thumb and make you lose your balance. That’s one reason I like chess because it’s sort of that way. And music – I mean good music. Most jazz and theme songs in the movies are like something a kid like Mick would draw on a piece of tablet paper – maybe a sort of shaky line all erased and messy. But the other music is sometimes like a great fine design and for a minute it makes you that way too. But about that sort of periscope – there’s really no such thing. And maybe that’s what everybody wants and they just don’t know it. They try one thing after another but that want is never really gone. Never.’
And when he had finished talking Harry’s face was still pale and frozen, like one of his wizened chess kings. He had nodded his head and that was all. Andrew hated him. But even so he knew that the next week he would go back.
That year he often went out roaming through the town. Not only did he get to know all the streets in the suburb where he lived, and those of the main blocks downtown, and the Negro sections – but he began to be familiar, also, with that part of town called South Highlands. This was the place where the most important business of the town, the three cotton factories, was situated. For a mile up the river there was nothing but these mills and the glutted little streets of shacks where the workers lived. This huge section seemed almost entirely separate from the rest of the town and when Andrew first began to go there he felt almost as though he were a hundred miles from home. Some afternoons he would walk up and down the steep foul sidestreets for hours. He just walked without speaking to anybody with his hands in his pockets, and the more he saw the more there was this feeling that he would have to keep walking on and on through those streets until his mind was settled. He saw things there that scared him in an entirely new way – new, because it was not for himself he was afraid and he couldn’t even put the reason into thought. But the fear kept on in him and sometimes it seemed it would almost choke him. Always people sitting on their front steps or standing in doorways would stare at him – and most of the faces were a pale yellow and had no expression except that of watching without any special interest. The streets were always full of kids in overalls. Once he saw a boy as old as he was piss on his own front steps when there were girls around. Another time a half grown fellow tried to trip him up and they had to fight. He had never been much of a fighter but in a scrap he always used his fists and butted with his head. But this boy was different. He fought like a cat and scratched and bit and kept snarling under his breath. The funny thing was that the fight was almost over and he felt himself on the ground and being choked when the fellow suddenly got limp like an old sack and in a minute more he gave up. Then when they were on their feet and just looking at each other he, the boy, did a crazy thing. He spat at him and slunk down to the ground and lay there on his back. The spit landed on his shoe and was thick like he had been saving it up a long time. But he looked down at him lying there on the ground and he felt sick and didn’t even think about making him fight again. It was a cold day but the boy didn’t have on anything but a pair of overalls and his chest was nothing but bones and his stomach stuck way out. He felt sick like he had hit a baby or a girl or somebody that should have been fighting on his side. The hoarse wailing whistles that marked the change in the mill shifts called out to him.
But even after that there was something in him that made him still walk the streets of South Highlands. He was looking for something but he didn’t know what it was.
In the Negro sections he felt none of this dim fear. Those parts of the town were a sort of home to him – especially the little street called Sherman’s Quarter where Vitalis lived. This street was on the edge of the City Limits and was only a few blocks from his own house. Most of the coloured people there did yard work or cooked for white people or took in washing. Behind the Quarter were the long miles of fields and pine woods where he would go on camping trips. As a kid he knew the names of everybody living anywhere near. When he would go camping he used to borrow a certain skinny little hound from an old man at the end of the Quarter and if he brought back a possum or a fish sometimes they would cook it and eat together. He knew the backs of those houses like his own yard – the black washpots, the barrel hoops, the plum bushes, the privies, the old automobile body without wheels that had set for years behind one of the houses. He knew the Quarter on Sunday mornings when the women would comb and plait their children’s hair in the sun on the front steps, when the grown girls would walk up and down in their trailing bright silk dresses, and the men would watch and softly whistle blues songs. And after supper time he knew it too. Then the light from the oil lamps would flicker from the houses and throw out long shadows. And there was the smell of smoke and fish and corn. And somebody was always dancing or playing the harp.
But there was one time when the Quarter was strange to him, and that was late at night. Several times on his way home late from hunting or when he was just restless, he had walked through the street at that time. The doors were all closed to the moonlight and the houses looked shrunk and had the look of shanties that have been empty a long time. At the same time there was that silence that never comes to a deserted place – and can only be sensed when there are many people sleeping. But as he would listen to this utter quietness he would always gradually become aware of a sound, and it was this that made the Quarter strange to him in the late night. The sound was never the same and it seemed always to come from a different place. Once it was like a girl laughing – softly laughing on and on. Again it was the low moan of a man in the darkness. The sound was like music except that it had no shape – it made him pause to hear and quiver as would a song. And when he would go home to bed the sound would still be inside him; he would twist in the darkness and his hard brown limbs would chafe each other because he could find no rest.
He never told Harry Minowitz about any of his walks. He could not imagine trying to tell anyone about that sound, least of all Harry, because it was a secret thing.
And he never talked to Harry about Vitalis.
When after school he would go back to the kitchen to Vitalis there were three words he always said. It was like answering present at the school roll-call. He would put down his books and stand in the doorway a moment and say: ‘I’m so hungry.’ The little sentence never changed and often he would not realize he had even spoken. Sometimes when he had just finished all the food he could eat and was still sitting there in the chair before the stove, restless but somehow not wanting to leave, he would mechanically mouth those three words. Just watching Vitalis brought them to his mind.
‘You eats more than any lanky boy I ever seen,’ she would say. ‘What the matter with you? I believe you just eats cause you want to do something and you don’t know what else to do.’
But she always had food for him. Maybe pot liquor and cornbread or biscuit and syrup. Sometimes she even made candy just for him or cut off a piece of the steak they were going to have for supper.
Watching Vitalis was almost as good as eating and his eyes would follow her around. She was not coal black like some coloured girls and her hair was always neatly plaited and shining with oil. Early every morning Sylvester, her boy-friend, walked to work with her and she usually wore a fancy red satin dress and earrings and high heeled green shoes. Then when she got in the house she would take off her shoes and wiggle her toes a while before putting on the bedroom slippers she wore to work in. She always hung her satin dress on the back porch and changed to a gingham one she kept at the house. She had the walk of coloured people who have carried baskets of clothes on their heads. Vitalis was good and there wasn’t anybody else like her.
Their talks together were warm and idle. What she didn’t understand didn’t gnaw on her and bother her. Sometimes he would blurt out things to her – and in a way it was like talking to himself. Her answers were always comfortable. They would make him feel like a kid again and he would laugh. One day he told her a little about Harry.
‘I seen him down to your Daddy’s store many a time. He a puny little white man, ain’t he? You know this here is a funny thing – nearly bout all little puny peoples is biggety. The littler they is the larger they thinks they is. Just watch the way they rares up they heads when they walk. Great big mens – like Sylvester and like you ghy be – they ain’t that way at all. When they be about six foots tall they liable to act soft and shamed like chilluns. Once I knowed a little biggety dwarf man name Hunch. I wish you could have seed the way on a Sunday he would commence to walk around. He carried a great big umbrella and he would priss down them streets by hisself like he was God -’
Then there was a morning when he came into the kitchen after playing a new Beethoven record he had got. The music had been in his head half the night and he had waked up early so as to play it awhile before school time. When he came into the kitchen Vitalis was changing her shoes. ‘Honey,’ she said. ‘You ought to been here a minute ago. I come in the kitchen and you was playing that there gramophone in your room. Sound like band music folks march by. Then I done looked down at the floor and you know what I seen? A whole fambly of little mices the size of your finger, setting up on their hind legs and dancing. That the truth. Them rats really does like such music.’
Maybe it was for words like this that he was always going in to Vitalis and saying, ‘I’m so hungry.’ It wasn’t only for warmed up food and coffee she would give him.
Sometimes they would talk about Sara. All the eighteen months that she was away she hardly ever wrote. And then the letter would just be about Aunt Esther and her music lessons and what they were going to have for dinner that night. He knew she was changed. And he had a feeling she was in trouble or something important was happening to her. But it got so that Sara was very vague to him – and it was terrible but when he tried to remember her face he couldn’t see it clearly. She got to be almost like their dead mother to him.
So it was Harry Minowitz and Vitalis who were nearest to him during that time. Vitalis and Harry. When he tried to think of them together he would have to laugh. It was like putting red with lavender – or a Bach fugue with a sad nigger whistling. Everything he knew seemed that way. Nothing fitted.
Sara came back but that didn’t change things much. They weren’t close like they had been before. Their Dad had thought it was time for her to come home but she didn’t seem glad to be back with her own family. And all the next year she would often get very quiet and just stare ahead like she was homesick. They didn’t go with the same crowd of boys and girls any more and often they didn’t even wait for each other to walk to school in the mornings. Sara had learned a lot of music in Detroit and her piano playing was different and very careful. He could tell that she had loved their Aunt Esther a lot but for some reason she didn’t talk about her much.
The trouble was that he saw Sara in a hazy way at that time. That was the way everything looked to him then. Crazy and upside down. And he was getting to be a man and he did not know what was going to come. And always he was hungry and always he felt that something was just about to happen. And that happening he felt would be terrible and would destroy him. But he would not mould that prescience into thought. Even the time – the two long years after Sara returned – seemed to have passed through his body and not his mind. It was just long months of either floundering or quiet vacantness. And when he thought back over it there was little that he could realize.
He was getting to be a man and he was seventeen years old.
It was then that the thing happened that he had expected without knowing in his mind. This thing he had never imagined and afterward it seemed to have leapt up out of nowhere – to his mind it seemed that way but there was another part of him where this was not so.
The time was late summer and in a few weeks he was planning to leave for Atlanta to enter Tech. He did not want to go to Tech – but it was cheap because he could take the co-op course and his Dad wanted him to graduate from there and be an engineer. There didn’t seem to be anything else that he could do and in a way he was eager to leave home so that he could live in a new place by himself. That late summer afternoon he was walking in the woods behind Sherman’s Quarter, thinking of this and of a hundred vague things. Remembering all the other times when he had walked through those woods made him restless and he felt lost and alone.
It was almost sundown when he left the woods and started through the street where Vitalis lived. Although it was Sunday afternoon the houses were very quiet and everyone seemed to be gone. The air was sultry and there was the smell of sun-baked pine straw. On the edges of the little street were trampled weeds and a few early goldenrods. As he was walking past the houses, his ankles grey with the lazy swirls of dust that his footsteps made and his eyes tired from the sun, he suddenly heard Vitalis speak to him.
‘What you doing round this way, Andrew?’
She was sitting on her front steps and seemed to be alone in the empty Quarter. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just wandering around.’
‘They having a big funeral down at our church. It the preacher dead this time. Everybody done gone but me. I just now got away from your house. Even Sylvester done gone.’
He didn’t know what to say but just the sight of her made him mumble, ‘Gosh I’m so hungry. All this walking around. And thirsty -’
‘I’ll get you some.’
She got up slowly and he noticed for the first time that she was barefooted and her green shoes and stockings were on the porch. She stooped to put them on. ‘I done taken these off cause ever body done gone except a sick lady in one of them end houses. These here green shoes has always scrunched my toes – and sometimes the ground sure do feel good to my feets.’
On the little stoop behind the house he drank the cool water and dashed some of it into his burning face. Again he felt as though he were hearing that strange sound he had heard late at night along this street. When he went back through the house where Vitalis had been waiting for him he felt his body tremble. He did not know why they both paused a moment in the dim little room. It was very quiet and a clock ticked slowly. There was a kewpie doll with a gauze sash on the mantlepiece and the air was close and musty.
‘What ails you, Andrew? Why you shaking so? What is it ails you, Honey?’
It wasn’t him and it wasn’t her. It was the thing in both of them. It was the strange sound he had heard there late at night. It was the dim room and the quietness. And all the afternoons he had spent with her in the kitchen. And all his hunger and the times when he had been alone. After it happened that was what he thought.
Later she went out of the house with him and they stood by a pine tree on the edge of the woods. ‘Andrew, quit your looking at me like that,’ she kept saying. ‘Everything is all right. Don’t you worry none about that.’
It was like he was staring at her from the bottom of a well and that was all he could think.
‘That ain’t nothing real wrong. It ain’t the first time with me and you a grown man. Quit your looking at me like that, Andrew.’
This had never been in his mind. But it had been there waiting and had crept up and smothered his other thoughts – And this was not the only thing that would do him that way. Always. Always.
‘Us didn’t mean nothing. Sylvester ain’t ghy ever know – or your Daddy. Us haven’t arranged this. Us haven’t done no real sin.’
He had imagined how it would be when he was twenty. And she had a pale face like a flower and that was all he knew of her.
‘Peoples can’t plan on everything.’
He left her. Harry’s chessmen, those precise and shrunken little dolls, neat problems in geometry, music that spun itself out immense and symmetrical. He was lost lost and it seemed to him that the end had surely come. He wanted to put his hands on all that had happened to him in his life, to grasp it to him and shape it whole. He was lost lost. He was alone and naked. And along with the chessmen and the music he suddenly remembered an aerial map of New York that he had seen – with the sharp skyscrapers and the blocks neatly plotted. He wanted to go far away and Atlanta was too near his home. He remembered the map of New York, frozen and delicate it was and he knew that was where he was going. That was all that he knew.
In the restaurant of the town where he had gotten off of the bus Andrew Leander finished the last of his beers. The place was closing and there would not be a bus to Georgia until morning. He could not get Vitalis and Sara and Harry and his Dad from his mind. And there were others beside them. He realized suddenly that he had hardly remembered Chandler. Chandler West who lived across the street – whom he had been with so often and who was at the same time so obscure. And the girl who wore red fingernail polish at high school. And the little rat of a boy named Peeper whom he had once talked with at South Highlands.
He got up from the table and picked up his bags. He was the last one in the restaurant and the waiter was ready to lock up. For a moment he hung around near the door that opened into the dark quiet street.
When he had first sat down at the table everything had seemed for the first time so clear. And now he was more lost than ever. But somehow it didn’t matter. He felt strong. In that dark sleepy place he was a stranger – but after three years he was going home. Not just to Georgia but to a nearer home than that. He was drunk and there was power in him to shape things. He thought of all of them at home whom he had loved. And it would not be himself but through all of them that he would find this pattern. He felt drunk and sick for home. He wanted to go out and lift up his voice and search in the night for all that he wanted. He was drunk drunk. He was Andrew Leander.
‘Say,’ he said to the boy who was waiting to lock the door. ‘Can you give me the name of some place around here where I can get a room for the night?’
The boy gave him some directions and in the surface of his mind he noted them. The street was dark and silent and he stood a moment longer in the open doorway. ‘Say,’ he said again. ‘I got off the bus half drunk. Will you tell me the name of this place?’