A Walker in the City (13 page)

Under the quilt at night, I could dream even before I went to sleep. Yet even there I could never see Mrs. Solovey's face clearly, but still ran round and round the block looking for her after I had passed her kitchen window. It was an old trick, the surest way of getting to sleep: I put the quilt high over my head and lay there burrowing as deep into the darkness as I could get, thinking of her through the long black hair the women on the counter wore. Then I would make up dreams before going to sleep: a face behind the lattice of a summer house, half-hidden in thick green leaves; the hard dots sticking out of the black wallpaper below; the day my mother was ill and our cousin had taken me to school. The moment I felt myself drifting into sleep, my right knee jerked as if I had just caught myself from tripping over something in the gutter. Then I would start up in fright, and perfectly awake, watching the flames dance out from under the covers in the stove, would dream of the druggist's wife and of her blond hair. I had not seen many fair-haired people until I met Mrs. Solovey. There were the Polish "broads" from East New York, smoking cigarettes on someone's lap in the "Coney Island" dives across the street from school, the sheen down their calves and the wickedness of their painted lips what you expected of a blonde. There were the four daughters of our Russian Christian janitor, Mrs. Krylot, all of them with bright golden hair and faces deeply carved and immobile as a wood cut. But they did not count; they smelled of the salt butter the Gentiles used; their blondness seemed naive and uncouth. Mrs. Solovey's I had identified from the first with something direct and sinful.

The Soloveys had been very puzzling; from the day they had come to our tenement, taking over the small dark apartment on the ground floor next to his drugstore, no one had been able to make them out at all. Both the Soloveys had had an inaccessible air of culture that to the end had made them seem visitors among us. They had brought into our house and street the breath of another world, where parents read books, discussed ideas at the table, and displayed a quaint, cold politeness addressing each other. The Soloveys had traveled; they had lived in Palestine, France, Italy. They were "professional" people, "enlightened"—she, it was rumored, had even been a physician or "some kind of scientist," we could never discover which.

The greatest mystery was why they had come to live in Brownsville. We looked down on them for this, and suspected them. To come
deliberately
to Brownsville, after you had lived in France and Italy! It suggested some moral sickness, apathy, a perversion of all right feelings. The apathy alone had been enough to excite me. They were different!

Of course the Soloveys were extremely poor—how else could they even have thought of moving in among us? There were two drab little girls with Hebrew names, who went about in foreign clothes, looking so ill-nourished that my mother was indignant, and vowed to abduct them from their strange parents for an afternoon and feed them up thoroughly. Mrs. Solovey was herself so thin, shy, and gently aloof that she seemed to float away from me whenever I passed her in the hall. There was no doubt in our minds that the Soloveys had come to Brownsville at the end of their road. But what had they hoped to gain from us? If they had ever thought of making money in a Brownsville drugstore, they were soon disenchanted. The women on the block bought such drugs as they had to when illness came. But they did not go in for luxuries, and they had a hearty, familiar way of expecting credit as their natural right from a neighbor and fellow Jew that invariably made Mr. Solovey furious. That was only for the principle of the thing: he showed no interest in making money. He seemed to despise his profession, and the store soon became so clogged with dust and mothballs and camphor-smelling paper wardrobes and the shampoo ads indignantly left him by salesmen of beauty preparations which he refused to stock, that people hated to go in. They all thought him cynical and arrogant. Although he understood well enough when someone addressed him in Yiddish, he seemed to dislike the language, and only frowned, curtly nodding his head to show that he understood. The Soloveys talked Russian to each other, and though we were impressed to hear them going on this way between themselves, everyone else disliked them for it. Not to use our familiar neighborhood speech, not even the English expected of the "educated," meant that they wanted us not to understand them.

Mr. Solovey was always abrupt and ill-tempered, and when he spoke at all, it was to throw a few words out from under his walrus mustache with an air of bitter disdain for us all. His whole manner as he stood behind his counter seemed to say: "I am here because I am here, and I may talk to you if I have to! Don't expect me to enjoy it!" His business declined steadily. Everyone else on the block was a little afraid of him, for he would look through a prescription with such surly impatience that rumors spread he was a careless and inefficient pharmacist, and probably unsafe to use. If he minded, he never showed it. There was always an open book on the counter, usually a Russian novel or a work of philosophy; he spent most of his time reading. He would sit in a greasy old wicker armchair beside the telephone booths, smoking Murads in a brown-stained celluloid holder and muttering to himself as he read. He took as little trouble to keep himself clean as he did his store, and his long drooping mustache and black alpaca coat were always gray with cigarette ash. It looked as if he hated to be roused from his reading even to make a sale, for the slightest complaint sent him into a rage. "I'll never come back to you, Mr. Solovey!" someone would threaten. "Thanks be to God!" he would shout back. "Thanks God! Thanks God! It will be a great pleasure not to see you!" "A
meshúgener,
" the women on the block muttered to each other. "A real crazy one. Crazy to death."

The Soloveys had chosen to live in Brownsville when they could have lived elsewhere, and this made them mysterious. Through some unfathomable act of will, they had chosen us. But for me they were beyond all our endless gossip and speculation about them. They fascinated me simply because they were so different. There was some open madness in the Soloveys' relation to each other for which I could find no parallel, not even a clue, in the lives of our own parents. Whenever I saw the strange couple together, the gold wedding ring on his left hand thick as hers, I felt they were still lovers. Yet the Soloveys were not rich. They were poor as we were, even poorer. I had never known anyone like them. They were weary people, strange and bereft people. I felt they had floated into Brownsville like wreckage off the ship of foreignness and "culture" and the great world outside. And there was that visible tie between them, that wedding ring even a man could wear, some deep consciousness of each other, that excited me, it seemed so illicit. And this was all the more remarkable because, though lovers, they were so obviously unhappy lovers. Had they chucked each other on the chin, had they kissed in public, they would have seemed merely idiotic. No, they seemed to hate each other, and could often be heard quarreling in their apartment, which sent every sound out into the hallway and the street. These quarrels were not like the ones we heard at home. There were no imprecations, no screams, no theatrical sobs: "You're killing me! You're plunging the knife straight into my heart! You're putting me into an early grave! May you sink ten fathoms into the earth!" Such bitter accusations were heard among us all the time, but did not mean even that someone disliked you. In Yiddish we broke all the windows to let a little air into the house.

But in the Soloveys' quarrels there was something worse than anger; it was hopelessness. I felt such despair in them, such a fantastic need to confront each other alone all day long, that they puzzled me by not sharing their feelings with their children.
They
alone, the gruff ne'er-do-well husband and his elusive wife, were the family. Their two little girls did not seem to count at all; the lovers, though their love had been spent, still lived only for each other. And it was this that emphasized their strangeness for me—it was as strange as Mr. Solovey's books, as a Brownsville couple speaking Russian to each other, as strange as Mrs. Solovey's delightfully shocking blondness and the unfathomable despair that had brought them to us. In this severe dependence on each other for everything, there was a defiance of the family principle, of us, of their own poverty and apathy, that encouraged me to despise our values as crude and provincial. Only in movies and in
The Sheik
did people abandon the world for love, give themselves up to it—gladly. Yet there was nothing obviously immoral in the conduct of the Soloveys, nothing we could easily describe and condemn. It was merely that they were sufficient to each other; in their disappointment as in their love they were always alone. They left us out, they left Brownsville out; we were nothing to them. In the love despair of the Soloveys something seemed to say that our constant fight "to make sure" was childish, that we looked at life too narrowly, and that in any event, we did not count. Their loneliness went deeper than our solidarity.

And so I loved them. By now I, too, wanted to defy Brownsville. I did not know where or how to begin. I knew only that I could dream all day long while pretending to be in the world, and that my mind was full of visions as intimate with me as loneliness. I felt I was alone, that there were things I had to endure out of loyalty but could never accept, and that whenever I liked, I could swim out from the Brownsville shore to that calm and sunlit sea beyond where
great friends
came up from the deep. Every book I read re-stocked my mind with those great friends who lived out of Brownsville. They came into my life proud and compassionate, recognizing me by a secret sign, whispering through subterranean channels of sympathy: "Alfred! Old boy! What have they done to you!" Walking about, I learned so well to live with them that I could not always tell whether it was they or I thinking in me. As each fresh excitement faded, I felt myself being flung down from great peaks. Sometimes I was not sure which character I was on my walks, there were so many in my head at once; or how I could explain one to the other; but after an afternoon's reading in the "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, I would walk past the pushcarts on Belmont Avenue and the market women crying "Oh you darlings! Oh you pretty ones! Come! Come! Eat us alive! Storm us! Devour us! Tear us apart!"—proud and alien as Othello, or dragging my clubfoot after me like the hero of
Of Human Bondage,
a book I had read to tatters in my amazement that Mr. W. Somerset Maugham knew me so well. In that daily walk from Glenmore to Pitkin to Belmont to Sutter I usually played out the life cycles of at least five imaginary characters. They did not stay in my mind very long, for I discovered new books every day; somewhere I felt them to be unreal, cut off by the sickening clean edge of the curb; but while they lived, they gave me a happiness that reverberated in my mind long after I had reached our street and had turned on the first worn step of our stoop for one last proud annihilating glance back at the block.

The Soloveys came into my life as the nearest of all the
great friends.
Everything which made them seem queer on the block deepened their beauty for me. I yearned to spend the deepest part of myself on someone close, someone I could endow directly with the radiant life of the brotherhood I joined in books. Passionately attached as I was to my parents, it had never occurred to me to ask myself what I thought of them as individuals. They were the head of the great body to which I had been joined at birth. There was nothing I could
give
them. I wanted some voluntary and delighted gift of emotion to rise up in me; something that would surprise me in the giving, that would flame directly out of me; that was not, like the obedience of our family love, a routine affair of every day. I wanted to bestow love that came from an idea. All day long in our kitchen my mother and I loved each other in measures of tribulation well-worn as the
Kol
Nidre.
We looked to each other for support; we recognized each other with & mutual sympathy and irritation; each of us bore some part of the other like a guarantee that the other would never die. I stammered, she used to say, because she stammered; when she was happy, the air on the block tasted new. I could never really take it in that there had been a time, even in
der heym,
when she had been simply a woman alone, with a life in which I had no part.

Running around the block summer evenings, I always stopped in front of the Soloveys' windows and looked across the spiked iron fence above the cellar steps on the chance that I might see Mrs. Solovey moving around her kitchen. I still spent hours every afternoon hanging around the telephone; he simply refused to answer it; and sometimes I would sit in his greasy old wicker armchair outside the booths, excitedly taking in the large color picture of General Israel Putnam on his horse riding up the stone steps just ahead of the British, the hard dots that stuck out of the black stippled wallpaper, the ladies dreaming in the brilliantine ads on the counter, the mothballs and camphor and brown paper wardrobes that always smelled of something deep, secret, inside. I liked to watch Mr. Solovey as he sat there reading behind his counter, perfectly indifferent to everyone, glowering and alone, the last wet brown inch of cigarette gripped so firmly between his teeth that I could never understand why the smoke did not get into his eyes or burn the edges of his mustache. It excited me just to watch someone read like that.

But now, night after night as I lay on our kitchen chairs under the quilt, I found I could will some sudden picture of his wife, hospitable and grave in the darkness. Everything that now made her so lustrous to me—her air of not being quite placed in life, her gentle aloofness, her secret carnality—was missing in her husband's appearance. The store went from bad to worse, and he seemed to plant himself more and more in the back of it like a dead tree defying us to cut him down. He never even looked at me when I sat in his wicker armchair near the telephone booths, but barricaded himself behind his counter, where his Russian novels lay in a mound of dust and gradually displaced the brilliantine ads and the ten-cent toilet articles. Except in emergencies, or when I had someone to call to the telephone, hardly anyone now came into the store. Most people were afraid of him, and the boys on the block took a special delight in exasperating him by banging a handball just above his kitchen windows. Yet there was something indomitable in his bearing, and with it an ill-concealed contempt for us all, that made it impossible to feel sorry for him. His blazing eyes, his dirty alpaca jacket always powdered with a light dust of cigarette ash, the walrus mustache that drooped down the sides of his mouth with such an expression of disgust for us, for his life—everything seemed to say that he did not care how he lived or what we thought of him. Having determined to fail, his whole bearing told me he had chosen
us
to watch him; and he would fail just as he liked, shocking us as he went under, like a man drowning before our eyes whom our cries could not save. Perhaps he liked to shock us; perhaps our shame and incredulity at seeing him put back so far were things he viciously enjoyed, since the whole manner of his life was an assault on our own hopes and our plain sense of right and wrong. There was something positive in him that had chosen to die, that mocked all our admiration for success. We failed every day, but we fought our failure; we hated it; we measured every action by its help in getting us around failure. Mr. Solovey confused us. In some unspoken way, full of bitterness and scorn, he seemed to say that success did not matter.