A Walker in the City (10 page)

Beyond the park the "fields" began, all those still unused lots where we could still play hard ball in perfect peace—first shooing away the goats and then tearing up goldenrod before laying our bases. The smell and touch of those "fields," with their wild compost under the billboards of weeds, goldenrod, bricks, goat droppings, rusty cans, empty beer bottles, fresh new lumber, and damp cement, lives in my mind as Brownsville's great open door, the wastes that took us through to the west. I used to go round them in summer with my cousins selling near-beer to the carpenters, but always in a daze, would stare so long at the fibrous stalks of the goldenrod as I felt their harshness in my hand that I would forget to make a sale, and usually go off sick on the beer I drank up myself. Beyond! Beyond! Only to see something new, to get away from each day's narrow battleground between the grocery and the back wall of the drugstore! Even the other end of our block, when you got to Mrs. Rosenwasser's house and the monument works, was dear to me for the contrast. On summer nights, when we played Indian trail, running away from each other on prearranged signals, the greatest moment came when I could plunge into the darkness down the block for myself and hide behind the slabs in the monument works. I remember the air whistling around me as I ran, the panicky thud of my bones in my sneakers, and then the slabs rising in the light from the street lamps as I sped past the little candy store and crept under the fence.

In the darkness you could never see where the crane began. We liked to trap the enemy between the slabs and sometimes jumped them from great mounds of rock just in from the quarry. A boy once fell to his death that way, and they put a watchman there to keep us out. This made the slabs all the more impressive to me, and I always aimed first for that yard whenever we played follow-the-leader. Day after day the monument works became oppressively more mysterious and remote, though it was only just down the block; I stood in front of it every afternoon on my way back from school, filling it with my fears. It was not death I felt there—the slabs were usually faceless. It was the darkness itself, and the wind howling around me whenever I stood poised on the edge of a high slab waiting to jump. Then I would take in, along with the fear, some amazement of joy that I had found my way out that far.

 

Beyond! Beyond!
Beyond
was "the city," connected only by interminable subway lines and some old Brooklyn-Manhattan trolley car rattling across Manhattan Bridge. At night, as the trolley ground its way home in the rain through miles of unknown streets from some meeting in the Jewish Daily
Forward
building on the East Side to which my father had taken me, I saw the flickering light bulbs in the car, the hard yellow benches on which we sat half asleep, the motorman's figure bulging the green curtain he had drawn against the lights in the car, as a rickety cart stumbling through infinite space—the driver taking us where?
Beyond
was the wheeze of an accordion on the Staten Island ferry boat—the music rocking in such unison with the vibration of the engines as the old man walked in and out of the cars on the lower deck squeezing the tunes out of the pleats that never after would I be able to take a ferry from South Ferry, from Christopher Street, from 23 rd, from Dyckman, from 125th, without expecting that same man to come round with his silver-backed accordion and his hat in his hand as he jangled a few coins in a metal plate.
Beyond
was the long shivering blast of the ferry starting out from the Battery in sight of the big Colgate ad across the river in Jersey; the depth of peace as the sun warmed the panels of the doors sliding out to the observation deck; the old Italian shoeshine men walking round and round with their boxes between all those suddenly relaxed New Yorkers comfortably staring at each other in the high wind on the top deck; a garbage scow burning in the upper bay just under Liberty's right arm; the minarets on Ellis Island; the old prison walls under the trees of Governor's Island; then, floating back in the cold dusk toward the diamond-lighted wall of Manhattan skyscrapers, the way we huddled in the great wooden varnish-smelling cabin inside as if we were all getting under the same quilt on a cold night.

Beyond
was the canvas awnings over an El station in summer. Inside, the florid red windows had curlicues running up and down their borders. I had never seen anything like them in all the gritty I.R.T. stations below. Those windows were richer than all my present. The long march of snails up and down and around the borders of those windows, the cursive scrolls in the middle patch forever turning back on themselves, promised to lead me straight into the old New York of gaslight and police stations I always looked for in the lower city. And of a winter afternoon—the time for which I most lovingly remember the El, for the color of the winter dusk as it fell through those painted windows, and the beauty of the snow on the black cars and iron rails and tar roofs we saw somewhere off Brooklyn Bridge—when the country stove next to the change booth blazed and blazed as some crusty old woman with a pince-nez gave out change, and the heavy turnstiles crashed with a roar inside the wooden shed—then, among the darkly huddled crowds waiting to go out to the train, looking out on Brooklyn Bridge all dark sweeping cable lines under drifts of snow, I pretended those were gaslights I saw in the streets below, that all old New Yorkers were my fathers, and that the train we waited for could finally take me back—back and back to that old New York of wood and brownstones and iron, where Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner had walked every night.

Beyond
was anything old and American—the name
Fraunces Tavern
repeated to us on a school excursion; the eighteenth-century muskets and glazed oil paintings on the wall; the very streets, the deeper you got into Brooklyn, named after generals of the Revolutionary War—Putnam, Gates, Kosciusko, DeKalb, Lafayette, Pulaski.
Beyond
was the sound of
Desbrosses
Street that steaming July morning we crossed back on a Jersey ferry, and the smell of the salt air in the rotting planks floating on the green scummy waters of the Hudson.
Beyond
was the watery floor of the Aquarium that smelted of the eternally wet skins of the seals in the great tank; the curve of lower Broadway around Bowling Green Park when you went up to Wall Street; the yellow wicker seats facing each other in the middle of the El car; the dome of the Manhattan Savings Bank over Chinatown at the entrance to Manhattan Bridge, and then in Brooklyn again, after we had traveled from light into dark, dark into light, along the shuddering shadowy criss-cross of the bridge's pillars, the miles and miles of Gentile cemeteries where crosses toppled up and down endless slopes.
Beyond
was that autumn morning in New Haven when I walked up and down two
red
broken paving stones, smelled the leaves burning in the yard, and played with black battered poker chips near the country stove in an aunt's kitchen; it was the speckles on the bananas hanging in the window of the grocery store another aunt owned in the Negro streets just behind Union Station in Washington; the outrageously warm taste of milk fresh from a cow that summer my mother cooked with a dozen others in the same Catskill boarding house; it was the open trolley cars going to Coney Island, the conductor swinging from bar to bar as he came around the ledge collecting fares; it was the
Robert Fulton
going up the Hudson to Indian Point, the ventilators on the upper deck smelling of soup.

Beyond,
even in Brownsville, was the summer sound of
flax
when my mother talked of
der heym.
It was the Negroes singing as they passed under our windows late at night on their way back to Livonia Avenue. It was the Children's Library on Stone Avenue, because they had an awning over the front door; in the long peaceful reading room there were storybook tiles over the fireplace and covered deep wooden benches on each side of it where I read my way year after year from every story of King Alfred the Great to
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Beyond
was the burly Jewish truckers from the wholesale fruit markets on Osborne Street sitting in their dark smoky "Odessa" and "Roumanian" tearooms, where each table had its own teapot, and where the men sat over mounds of saucers smoking Turkish cigarettes and beating time to the balalaíka.
Beyond
was the way to the other end of Sutter Avenue, past a store I often went into to buy buttons and thread for my mother, and where the light simmered on the thin upturned curves of the pearl buttons in the window.
Beyond
was the roar in the Pennsylvania freight yards on the way to East New York; even the snow houses we built in the backyard of a cousin's house on Herzl Street waiting to ambush those thieves from Bristol Street. It was the knife grinder's horse and wagon when he stopped on our block, and an "American" voice called up to every window,
Sharpen kníves! Sharpen kníves!—
that man had obviously come from a long way off.

 

Beyond! Beyond! It was the clean, general store smell of packaged white bread in the A&P that Passover week I could not eat matzoh, and going home, hid the soft squunchy loaf of Ward's bread under my coat so that the neighbors would not see. It was the way past the car barns at the end of Rockaway Avenue, that week my father was painting in New Lots, and I took that route for the first time, bringing him his lunch one summer afternoon. I could not wait to get out on the other side of the dark subway station. I had never seen another part of Brownsville where the going was so strange, where streets looked so empty, where the sun felt so hot. It was as if there were not enough houses there to stand in its way. When the sun fell across the great white pile of the new Telephone Company building, you could smell the stucco burning as you passed; then some liquid sweetness that came to me from deep in the rings of freshly cut lumber stacked in the yards, and the fresh plaster and paint on the brand-new storefronts. Rawness, sunshiny rawness down the end streets of the city, as I thought of them then—the hot ash-laden stink of the refuse dumps in my nostrils and the only sound at noon the resonant metal plunk of a tin can I kicked ahead of me as I went my way. Then two blocks more, and the car barns I loved. The light falling down the hollows in the corrugated tin roof seemed to say
Go over! Go over!,
marked the place from which the stacked trolley cars began all over again their long weary march into the city. I liked to see them stacked against each other, a thin trail of track leading out of the sheds, then another track, then another, until everywhere you could see, the streets were wild with car tracks pointing the way back to the city.

Beyond
was that day they took us first to the Botanic Garden next to the Brooklyn Museum, and after we went through the bamboo gate into the Japanese Garden, crossed over a curved wooden bridge past the stone figure of a heron dreaming in the water, I lay in the grass waiting to eat my lunch out of the shoe box and wondered why water lilies floated half-submerged in the pond and did not sink. They led us into the museum that day, up the big stone steps they had then, through vast empty halls that stung my nose with the prickly smell of new varnish and were lined with the effigies of medieval Japanese warriors—the black stringy hairs on their wigs oppressively unreal, the faces mock-terrible as they glared down at us through their stiffly raised swords, everything in that museum wearisome and empty and smelling of floor polish until they pushed us through a circular room upstairs violently ablaze with John Singer Sargent's watercolors of the Caribbean and into a long room lined with oily dim farmscapes of America in the nineteenth century, and I knew I would come back, that I would have to come back.

Museums and parks were related, both oases to stop in "beyond." But in some way museums and parks were painful, each an explosion of unbearable fullness in my brain. I could never go home from the Brooklyn Museum, a walk around the reservoir in Central Park, or sit in a rowboat Sunday afternoons in Prospect Park—where your voice hallooed against the stone walls of the footbridge as you waited in that sudden cold darkness below, boat against boat, to be pushed on to the boathouse and so end the afternoon—without feeling the same sadness that came after the movies. The day they took us to the Children's Museum—rain was dripping on the porch of that old wooden house, the halls were lined with Audubon prints and were hazel in the thin antique light—I was left with the distinct impression that I had been stirring between my fingers dried earth and fallen leaves that I had found in between the red broken paving stones of some small American town. I seemed to see neighborhood rocks and minerals in the dusty light of the late afternoon slowly stirring behind glass at the back of the village museum. But that same day they took us to Forest Park in Queens, and I saw a clearing filled with stone picnic tables—
nothing
had ever cried out such a welcome as those stone tables in the clearing—saw the trees in their dim green recede in one long moving tide back into dusk, and gasped in pain when the evening rushed upon us before I had a chance to walk that woodland through.

There was never enough time. The morning they led us through the Natural History Museum, under the skeletons of great whales floating dreamlike on wires from the ceiling, I had to wait afterward against the meteor in the entrance yard for my dizziness to pass. Those whales! those whales! But that same morning they took us across Central Park to the Metropolitan, and entering through the back door in from the park, I was flung spinning in a bewilderment of delight from the Greek discus-throwers to the Egyptians to the long rows of medieval knights to the breasts of Venus glistening in my eyes as she sat—some curtain drawn before her hiding the worst of her nakedness—smiling with Mars and surrounded by their children.

The bewilderment eased, a little, when we went up many white steps directly to the American paintings. There was a long, narrow, corridor-looking room lined with the portraits of seventeenth-century merchants and divines—nothing for me there as they coldly stared at me, their faces uninterruptedly rosy in time. But far in the back, in an alcove near the freight elevator, hung so low and the figures so dim in the faint light that I crouched to take them in, were pictures of New York some time after the Civil War—skaters in Central Park, a red muffler flying in the wind; a gay crowd moving round and round Union Square Park; horse cars charging between the brownstones of lower Fifth Avenue at dusk. I could not believe my eyes. Room on room they had painted my city, my country—Winslow Homer's dark oblong of Union soldiers making camp in the rain, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground as I had never thought I
would
get to see them when we sang that song in school; Thomas Eakins's solitary sculler on the Schuylkill, resting to have his picture taken in the yellow light bright with patches of some raw spring in Pennsylvania showing on the other side of him; and most wonderful to me then, John Sloan's picture of a young girl standing in the wind on the deck of a New York ferryboat—surely to Staten Island, and just about the year of my birth?—looking out to water.