A Walker in the City (16 page)

The way anywhere those summer evenings led through the rival meetings on Pitkin Avenue. I could always find people there. Socialism would come to banish my loneliness. Night after night now, going up Chester to Pitkin, I could not wait to get to the end of the street. The old beat-up boards of the synagogue porch looked frayed in the light, and the
shammes
sat on the steps desolately picking his nose as he frowned over the kids playing a last game of boxball in the gutter. From below the long glittering electric sign S
TADIUM
A
LWAYS A GOOD PICTURE AT THE
S
TADIUM
S
TADIUM
the thick sweet fumes of deodorant out of the gents' were now stale and uninviting. Pitkin Avenue was already ablaze. From blocks away you could hear the Communist voice on the bank corner shouting into the great dark crowd, and some wistful Socialist voice on the opposite corner crying in rebuttal, and before you knew where you were, a sea of faces from Woolworth's to Kresge's had lifted you on its strong angry tide and had flung you against the gray marble wall of the savings bank. "W
ORKERS AND PEOPLE OF
B
ROWNSVILLE
...! H
OW LONG WILL YOU
...!"

Sometimes we would walk up Pitkin Avenue with them after both meetings had collapsed under the storm of private arguments, ourselves still bitterly arguing each inch of the way. On the nights the Communists held "open meetings" in their headquarters on Thatford Avenue, they would lead us up endless staircases to a huge loft where the walls seemed to crackle with their tension and were lined round and round with long canvas red-painted strips crying D
EFEND THE
S
OVIET
U
NION
and F
REE
T
OM
M
OONEY
and T
HE
S
OCIALIST
P
ARTY IS THE THIRD PARTY OF
C
APITALISM
. And often, after one of those regular Friday evening battles on Pitkin Avenue, I would meet up with them again on the benches in Betsy Head Park, where one night the local C.P. organizer told me that I could not join even if I wanted to, for I was a student, not a
worker,
and as we sat arguing France, Italy, Germany, and the British General Strike of 1926, I could hear the spiked shoes of a boy in the darkness below running round and round the track.

 

It was to the sound of
The Waste Land
being read aloud that I met David. Whenever I got tired of flopping around the dusty streets and rang Isrolik's bell, the banister smelled of damp, the mother sat on a kitchen chair moaning against her unemployed husband as she stared at the sink, and from the city relief checks and cold family despair in that house Isrolik would start up with his glassy imperturbable poet's smile: "What an idiot! You still walking around in this heat? Come in and listen to Eliot! Everybody else is here!"

They lived on the ground floor, in a perpetual sour smell from the backyard. Wherever you sat in that house, you saw the clotheslines in the yard. On the round table in the "dining room," Isrolik's study by day and a bedroom for the four younger children at night, lay the hallowed copy of
The Waste Land
that he carried around with him wherever he went, and his regular offering of
Poetry, The New Masses,
squares of chocolate
Halvah,
biscuit sandwiches filled with a soft vanilla cream beginning to run in the heat, and bottles of seltzer. Isrolik and I never took to each other, but he was the first boy I knew in Brownsville who cared for poetry, and who even wrote it. So despite all my uneasiness in his house, it always astonished and excited me to sit around that table with him and David and two or three other boys who would listen gravely, munching the biscuit sandwiches and drinking seltzer as Isrolik read aloud from
The Waste Land,
and then comment on the
technic
and the
symbolism.

I had never seen such boys before; I had not known they existed in Brownsville. There was one they privately called the
hunchback,
for his head was so enormous that it looked ready to fall of its own weight back on his spine. He was so ashamed that he never looked anyone in the face, and from time to time would mumble quotations he hoped someone would recognize and so begin to talk with him. Whenever we all went about in the evenings—to the Free Theater on East 27th Street to see
Rosmersholm
or
Ghosts,
to the Civic Repertory to see Eva Le Gallienne in
Hedda Gabler,
to Lincoln Terrace Park to pick up a girl—he walked behind us whispering lines from
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
to see if we knew the next ones. There was another, his cheeks so pitted with acne that it was as if muddy wheels had passed over his face, who spoke every word with an Oxford accent. Whenever you sat next to him, you could hear each sharp intake of his breath like a hiss. There was still another, with a small growth of beard—they called him Ilyich, in honor of Lenin—a boy much older than the rest of us, a strange boy who lived by himself in a furnished room off Dumont Avenue, who had sworn never to shave until the
boss class
freed Tom Mooney. His long matted hair and beard gave him so archaic a look that I could never take it in that he was really there with me, talking in his gently condescending voice as I stared at the clotheslines. He seemed to be someone I had remembered from a book, or perhaps even from a dream, about Russian intellectuals sitting around a hut in Siberia early in the century.

It was his feeling for poetry that held me to Isrolik's damp cluttered "study" those summer evenings. Wherever I looked, there were loose sheets of his own poems on the table, the floor, the beds, thrown in with stray issues of
Poetry,
commentaries on Eliot, and poems torn out of
The New Masses.
If Isrolik had to go into the kitchen to quiet his mother down, or to feed one of the children, or had to speak to us about anything not directly connected with poetry, he became irritable and impatient, tapped his feet and giggled nervously in his high thin voice until he could get back to reading from
The Waste Land,
a poem he loved with such breathless adoration that I seemed to see him sucking on each phrase like a lozenge he could not bear to swallow. Even when we tried to make money selling Eskimo Pies on the Coney Island beach, he would cry SHANTIH SHANTIH SHANTIH as we thrashed our way through the sands.

Yet in some way that puzzled me—I was so grateful to him for living two blocks away—I felt uneasy in his presence, and whenever I listened to him reading from
The Waste Land
to the sound of the mother moaning in the kitchen, I kept expecting a scream, a blow, perhaps even a fire, to bring things to a head in that house. How grim, sour and alone I felt as we walked around Brownsville those summer evenings arguing Keats and Shelley, Blake and Coleridge, Trotsky and Stalin. It was the second summer of the depression: my father had not worked for nine months, and every Friday evening as we sat down to eat my mother cried out: "Better I should work all night than we should take from the city!" Spain had a republic at last, and in England Ramsay MacDonald had just stabbed the Labor Party to the heart. I remember how we stopped in a school playground off Powell Street to play one last furious game of handball in the fading light; how, in front of a cutlery store on Belmont Avenue whose windows were ablaze with light, I stood looking at all those scissors and knives as Isrolik and his friends cried "Sellouts! Sellouts!" along my right ear. I felt that loneliness that shamed me after Socialist meetings on the steps of the Labor Lyceum—a loneliness I felt even in the massed and steaming "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, where all the future young lawyers sat at their law books with green eye-shades fixed over their faces like a second frown of attention; and in Lincoln Terrace Park, where old men played chess in the light from the street lamps. As we sat around all night arguing France, Germany, China, Italy, Spain, I hungrily listened to the girls squealing in the grass below.

The best of that bunch was David. He was a chemist, but I understood him better than I did Isrolik. David loved Beethoven, and
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell;
he could always predict in advance the days on which Macy's would put Modern Library books up for thirty-eight cents; and though entirely devoted to chemistry and the
Negro question
and forever blinking at me uneasily from behind his thick glaring lenses, he would sit in our "dining room" every late Friday afternoon reading aloud in a clear voice the essays and poems and sketches I had written at the kitchen table that week, and from time to time say with a heartwarming smile: "That's good! That's a pretty good phrase! I really think you're improving!" Crowded summer nights in the "adults'" library on Glenmore Avenue, how good it was to run into David in the fiction section—just there, where Gogol's
Summer Evenings on a Farm Near Dikánka
seemed to me the most beautiful title I had ever seen—how good just to walk him home to East New York, singing themes from the Beethoven Violin Concerto as we went.

It was poorer at his end than where we lived; most of the houses were the oldest tenements, with wooden staircases; when you went up the street bridge that led past the railroad yards, the streets looked as if they had cracked under the hot steam and the thunder from the freight cars being shuttled below. Along the route there were old tinsmith shops in basements, little unpainted wooden synagogues so old and bent and squeezed for space that you could see the boards loose in the walls; sweatshops where they made artificial flowers and ladies' slips until late in the evening. But I preferred it there; the nearer I got to David's house, the deeper I seemed to enter into Brownsville's frankness. Here was the other border, as far as possible from the
alrightniks
on Eastern Parkway; here was the turn-off for Highland Park, the transfer point to all good things that summer I was sixteen. The minute I went up the cracked and moldy wooden steps of David's house, my heart began to race against the thunder from the railroad yards. "Go over! Go over!"

The thing I always saw first in David's dining room was the far wall solidly covered with newspaper pictures of lynchings, pickets being beaten up by the police, Ukrainian wheat fields from
Soviet Russia Today,
photographs, torn out of books, of Lenin, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick W. Douglass, Henri Barbusse, and Ernst Thaelmann. On the bureau next to his chemistry texts, ranged in front of the glass so that you saw their backs reflected in the glass whenever you looked at them, were the collected works of Lenin. On the wall above hung the usual oval photographs of the grandfather and grandmother, side by side staring down at me where I had nervously caught my shoes in the holes of the dark-brown linoleum. Whenever I looked away from those pictures on the far wall of Negroes hanging from the boughs of trees in the deep South, I would see those dead grandparents gloomily taking me in, and would feel that I had come up too close to some strange stone carving in the desert and had fallen between the cracks.

On those hot summer evenings you could hear through the screens the endless charging of the freight cars in the yards. The mother, already yellow with cancer, sat silently and stiffly propped up on pillows; a young boy sat at her feet waving a palmetto fan, and whenever she cried out, would glare up at me fiercely and dash into the kitchen for another glass of water. In that house the light of the early summer evening had the same yellowness as the mother's face. She was small, with her hair oddly cut short like a boy's; and whenever I saw her, wore an old patched middy blouse; the yellowness of that room ran in sick querulous waves down into the bandages thick over her left breast. From the stale weedy garden patch in the old "private" house next door, the dusty prong of an old tree pressed against the window screen, and when the screen rattled in the sudden windy darkening of the air before a rainstorm, seemed to expel a thin layer of dust into the room.

Everything in that house looked as if it had come down to a few minimum utensils for eating, sleeping, and dying. I remember the peculiar desolation of the broken dining room chairs around the table, and how, every time I moved, my shoes seemed to catch in the holes of the linoleum. Yet far more than the poverty in that orphaned and rotting house; more, even, than the sense of impending death, it was some deep, brave, and awful earnestness before life itself I always felt there. From time to time I would even catch in the air the curious, unbelievable idea that David had stripped their life deliberately to those chemistry textbooks, the collected works of Lenin, those Negroes on the far wall hanged, castrated, and burned in darkest Georgia. I had never seen such a naked house. And that it should be lived in so indifferently; that David should walk so carelessly across the hollows in the linoleum as he went over to the bureau to seize a fresh volume of Lenin that might purge me of my
confusions
and harden me up at last; that the mother herself, whether from interest or despair, should ignore everything there but our bitter arguments as she silently looked down at us—it was just this that kept me coming back. The house was so naked, everyone in it seemed entirely free to think.

 

It was the lapping of the water against the wire fence I heard most below the sound of my voice when we went round and round the old reservoir. Those still, perfectly hot afternoons, Highland Park was so quiet, you could hear children talking to each other in the empty bandstand below, the drip of the water fountains down in the park, a girl laughing at the other end of the path around the reservoir. The reservoir rose at the very top of a hill; the hill overlooked the last of Brooklyn, the thousands of tombstones in the great cemeteries just beyond, distant windows blinking in the skyscrapers white in the sun over midtown Manhattan. But no one ever seemed to go to Highland Park much; the reservoir itself, they said, had not been used for years. Even in the middle of a June afternoon, the graveled path around it was so quiet, I could hear the water lapping against the wire fence.