Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (46 page)

A silence fell when Caleb ceased speaking such as I had never known before, and have not known since. It was a silence loud enough to wake the dead. It was the silence that Jesus had in mind when he told the Pharisees
that if his disciples held their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. It was a silence in which one seemed to hear the bloodstream move. One wondered at its cargo. In the awful light—the awful light—and in this silence, we now watched each other. How terrible it is to overhear a confession! He was more than ever my brother now, forever—and he was more than ever a stranger, forever and forever: because I had seen him for the first time. We listened to the sounds coming in from the streets. It was three o'clock in the morning.

I did not say anything. I rose and went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of rum. I came back with it, and sat down at the table again.

He walked over to me, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“When you've been down in that valley, Leo,” he said, “when you been wrestling with the angel, it changes you. It changes you. Everybody hits that valley, Leo, but don't everyone come up. Love lifted me. And I'm free at last.”

Free at last, free at last, praise God Almighty, I'm free at last!
These words rang in my mind. I sipped my rum. His hand was very heavy on my shoulder. I felt his weariness, and smelled his sweat—fleeting, like my memory of our past, and indescribable, inaccessible, like that. What did I feel? I cannot tell. I will never know. I felt, for the first time, and it must be rare, another human being occupying my flesh, walking up and down in me. And that is why I cannot tell, that is why I cannot remember. Oh. I remember the candle before me, burning low; I thought, I must put it out. I remember that I thought that the police would soon walk by, checking the lights. They might come in. I remember thinking, I promised Caleb
that I would come home soon, to see my father and my mother. I remember the way the restaurant looked at that moment, the tables not cleared, coffee cups and dessert plates everywhere, and some tables needed new candles. I remember all that, and his hand on my shoulder, and the silence.

I was nineteen then, and Caleb was twenty-six. Years and years later, I grabbed Barbara back from her Sutton Place window ledge, eight stories up. Let us pretend that I was a man by that time. I remember that moment very well. I remember that Barbara and I had had what we both then considered to be our deadliest, irrevocable fight. I remember that I took my gray topcoat off her sofa, and put it on, and walked out of her living room, walked the long corridor to the door. I had left her on the floor, in her nightgown, crying. I walked out of the apartment, slamming the door, and buzzed for the elevator. I watched the indicator as the car moved up to eight. Eight. Somehow, that number began to scream in my mind. The indicator struck six, and, without knowing that I was going to do it, I turned away from the elevator, and took out my keys and opened Barbara's door and walked back into the apartment. It was silent. I slammed the door behind me—or, rather, the door slammed behind me, and, far off, I heard another door slam, the door to Barbara's bedroom. But both doors had been slammed by the wind. I ran to the bedroom, and opened the door—what guided me?—and saw Barbara, with her back to me, sitting on the window ledge, swinging her feet like a child, and about to drop. I pulled her back by the hair. I remember that moment, I remember it well, and I know that I have since used it in my work. But I have never consciously used that moment in the restaurant with
Caleb. I remember it only in flashes, hot and cold. It may be that, by the time I dragged Barbara back from the ledge, I knew enough to know that she might be sitting there. But I did not know, when Caleb walked into The Island on that far-off night, how many ways there were to die, and how few to live.

“You'll see it, too, one day,” he said—very carefully, very softly—“the light. I know you will. I know it. You don't know how hard I pray for you.”

Well. I remember that he helped me wash the dishes. We talked of other things, and we laughed a lot. We were almost friends again. I remember that, at one point, he picked up my forgotten, unfinished glass of rum and poured it into the sink. “Soon, you won't be needing that, little brother.” I remember the way the rum and the soapy water smelled. I remember how it looked—and we both laughed as it vanished down the drain, white soap and black sugar. We left the kitchen spotless. He helped me set up my tables. I turned out all the lights and locked up the joint and I walked him to his subway. I watched him run down the steps and he turned, one last time, at the bottom of the steps, to smile and wave. I realized again how glad I'd been to see him. Then, he disappeared. The morning light was rising now, as I walked home, walked toward the river, walked toward Barbara.

I kept my promise to go home on that Thursday, but of course that didn't really help. I had made—I had made it without knowing that I had—some enormous and unshakable resolution. I had arrived at an awful cunning, which was to be protected by silence. I knew that Caleb would never see the case as I saw it—no one would ever see my case, and so I would not waste breath presenting
it. But I knew what I was going to do. I was alone all right; for God had taken my brother away from me; and I was never going to forgive Him for that. As far as the salvation of my own soul was concerned, Caleb was God's least promising missionary. God was not going to do to me what He had done to Caleb. Never. Not to me.

I walked home, that morning, as I say, and I stood over Barbara for a long time, and watched her sleeping in our bed. I remember the way she looked that morning, her hair curling over the pillow, one thin hand clutching the blanket, as though she sensed departure. She worked very hard, my poor little girl, at some bleakly piss-elegant establishment, like Longchamps. I sat at the window, and lit a cigarette. Our room faced what had once been a courtyard; directly facing me was the opposite wing of this decrepit complex. In some windows, the shades were down—those hideous kinds of paper shades, which leap out of your hand and curl round and round themselves and are as hard to reach, then, as a treed cat. In other windows, the shades were up. No one in Paradise Alley could really have anything to hide. The people slept. Everything was still. I can't stay here, I thought. And I looked back at Barbara. I closed the window and I pulled down the shade and I got undressed.

The proud and desperate years began. That winter ended, and the summer came again. Barbara got a job in summer stock, but I didn't. I didn't go away with the Workshop, though they wanted me to come and play Crooks again and drive that goddamn car again. I stayed with The Island, and I found a voice teacher, and I studied that guitar. A few of the show business people who came in were nice to me, and they invited me here and there. I began to be seen around. It was accepted that I
was talented—this came as something of a surprise, but it was a nice surprise. I sang at The Island almost every night, and more and more people came to hear me—so many that Hilda had to hire a helper for me; and we had trouble with the cops, which eventually ended those sessions. Hilda gave an Island ball at a big hall in Harlem, and she had got some very big show business names to perform, and I was on the bill, too. That was the very first time I ever saw my name on a poster and I carried it to my mother and father and they came to the ball—but Caleb didn't; now, he was in the world, but not of it—and my mother and father were very proud of me, and we had a very nice time that night. And, like all kids, with their first taste of the deeply desired approbation, I saw myself on the heights already. But, in fact, I wasn't being hired, and it was a very long time before I was.

Barbara and I split up, for the first of many times. We didn't see each other for a long time, not until I took Sally to see her in her first Broadway show. She played a very small part, but she was noticed, and she got offers from Hollywood which she had the good sense to turn down. I plodded on, and Sally and I split up, and I left The Island and started singing in a short-lived Village supper club. I got hired, as I've said, for bit parts here and there, odd parts here and there, but nothing led to anything and I was beginning to be more and more frightened. Steve and I split up, insofar as we had ever really been together, and, at the same time, Caleb got married, and I was the best man at his wedding. He married a woman named Louise, heavy and black and respectable, who would certainly take excellent care of him. I remember the wedding because I hated being
there. By now, I was twenty-five, and I was terribly ashamed of the life I lived. Everyone had found the life that suited them; but I hadn't. Caleb looked safe and handsome that day, he had become a preacher and was now assistant pastor at The New Dispensation House of God. Now, he had a wife and a home and he'd have children, all according to God's plan. But, my life! It made me, I know, very defensive and difficult. I was a short-order cook, I was a waiter, I was a busboy, I was an elevator boy, I was a messenger, I was a shipping clerk—and that's when times were good. Otherwise, I was a bum, a funky, homeless bum, a grown man who slept in flop-houses and movies, who often walked the streets without the price of subway fare, and who really knew no one because I didn't
want
to know the people in my condition—I didn't
like
my condition, I was
not
going to make peace with it, I was not going to enter the marihuana-drenched, cheap-beer-and-whiskey-soaked camaraderie of the doomed. I was going to change my condition, somehow, somehow—how?—and I was too proud to approach the affluent. My recollection of those years is not that I pounded the pavement, but crawled on my face over every inch of it. Breaks came and went, but terror and trouble stayed. The worst of it was, perhaps, that I most thoroughly avoided the people who loved me most. Barbara, for example, once spent a week in New York looking for me. She couldn't find me. I knew she was in town because I knew the show she was with was in town. But Barbara had a job, and I didn't. I knew I couldn't fool her the way I fooled others—I hoped—with my clean shirt and mattress-pressed pants and shiny shoes and clean fingernails. How I managed to keep clean the half dozen shirts which saw me through those years I'll never
know. I knew—or I felt—that people were beginning to give me up. They felt, I was sure, that I was destined, simply, to become a part of the wreckage which lines every steep road. And, since I felt this way, I began to act this way—the most dangerous moment of all. I began to smell of defeat: that odor which seals your doom. I was drinking far too much, for people will always buy you a drink. And it was in a bar, in fact, that something happened which turned out, as we survivors love to put it, to be my first real break, the solid break, the break which made the others possible. It certainly didn't look like a break. It only looked like a job. I wasn't absolutely on my ass at this point. I was working as a short-order cook in Harlem. But, of course, I didn't want to spend my life as a short-order cook, and I was very low because I knew my mother wasn't well.

This man came over to me, a white man, very friendly, and said his name was Ray Fisher. He asked me how I was, and what I was doing. I didn't know the man, and I hated people to ask me questions like that, I was ashamed to tell people what I was doing. But I was also too proud to lie. This man had heard me sing, somewhere, and he had seen me on the stage; which caused me, I must say, enormously to respect his powers of observation. And he told me that a little theater group was going to do an experimental version of
The Corn Is Green.
This production would utilize Negroes, and they were looking for a Negro boy who could sing, to play the lead. He was a friend of the director's, which was how he knew about it, and he knew that the director had also seen me, and had a hunch about me. He said that it was only scheduled for seven performances, and the pay wasn't very much. But, on his own behalf, and on behalf
of the director, his friend, he very much hoped that I'd think about it—it might, he said, with that innocent earnestness which characterizes so many Americans, be a kind of breakthrough. Anyway, it might be worth looking into, he thought, and he gave me the address of the theater. Which wasn't in the Village, but way down on the East Side, precisely the neighborhood where nobody would ever dream of going, especially not to see an experimental production, with a Negro in the male lead, of
The Corn Is Green.

I remember looking at him, and saying, “The corn is
green?
” I was sure he was joking, or mad. You meet all kinds of people in bars. But he didn't seem to be joking, and he didn't seem to be mad. I'd never read the play, but I'd seen Ethel Barrymore play it. I didn't remember the boy's part at all. It all sounded, really, almost completely mad: I kept staring at Ray, whom I didn't yet recognize as the hand of God. But we had a few drinks; he was really very nice; I promised I'd go down, because he really seemed to mean it. But what decided me, really, was a telegram under my door, when I got home that night. I was living on 19th Street and Fourth Avenue. It was, you know, well—shit!—they really
have
been looking for me. So, in the morning, I called the barbecue joint, to say I'd be coming in late, and I went on down.

When things go wrong, the good Lord knows they go wrong; one can find oneself in trouble so deep and so bizarre that one
knows
one can never get out of it; and it doesn't help at all, as the years swagger brutally by, to recognize that much of one's trouble is produced by the really unreadable and unpredictable convolutions of one's own character. I've sat, sometimes, really helpless and terrified before my own, watching it spread danger
and wonder all over my landscape—and not only my own. It is a terrible feeling. One learns, at such moments, not merely how little we know, but how little whatever we know is able to help us. But sometimes things go right. And these moments, humiliatingly enough, don't seem to have anything to do with one's character at all. I got to this tiny little theater, and I met the director, Konstantine Rafaeleto, a nice man, a heavy-set Greek about forty-odd, and I liked him right away, liked his handshake, liked his eyes. The first thing he said, after “Good morning, Mr. Proudhammer. I'm glad we found you—you're a hard man to find, do you know that?” was “Do you know the script?” I said, No, but I'd seen the play. He said, “Forget that,” and handed me a script. I thought he wanted me to read, but he poured two cups of coffee and we sat down and he began to tell me what he had in mind.