Another Country (18 page)

In Harlem, however, he had merely dropped his load and marked the spot with silver. It had seemed much simpler for a time. But even simple pleasure, bought and paid for, did not take long to fail— pleasure, as it turned out, was not simple. When, wandering about Harlem, he came across a girl he liked, he could not fail to wish that he had met her somewhere else, under different circumstances. He could not fail to disapprove of her situation and to demand of her more than any girl in such a situation could give. If he did not like her, then he despised her and it was very painful for him to despise a colored girl, it increased his self-contempt. So that, by and by, however pressing may have been the load he carried uptown, he returned home with a greater one, not to be so easily discharged.

For several years it had been his fancy that he belonged in those dark streets uptown precisely because the history written in the color of his skin contested his right to be there. He enjoyed this, his right to
be
being everywhere contested; uptown, his alienation had been made visible and, therefore, almost bearable. It had been his fancy that danger, there, was more real, more open, than danger was downtown and that he, having chosen to run these dangers, was snatching his manhood from the lukewarm waters of mediocrity and testing it in the fire. He had felt more alive in Harlem, for he had moved in a blaze of rage and self-congratulation and sexual excitement, with danger, like a promise, waiting for him everywhere. And, nevertheless, in spite of all this daring, this running of risks, the misadventures which had actually befallen him had been banal indeed and might have befallen him anywhere. His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars. For memories, he had one or two marijuana parties, one or two community debauches, one or two girls whose names he had forgotten, one or two addresses which he had lost. He knew that Harlem was a battlefield and that a war was being waged there day and night— but of the war aims he knew nothing.

And this was due not only to the silence of the warriors— their silence being, anyway, spectacular in that it rang so loud: it was due to the fact that one knew of battles only what one had accepted of one’s own. He was forced, little by little, against his will, to realize that in running the dangers of Harlem he had not been testing his manhood or heightening his sense of life. He had merely been taking refuge in the outward adventure in order to avoid the clash and tension of the adventure proceeding inexorably within. Perhaps this was why he sometimes seemed to surprise in the dark faces which watched him a hint of amused and not entirely unkind contempt. He must be poor indeed, they seemed to say, to have been driven here. They knew that he was driven, in flight: the liberal, even revolutionary sentiments of which he was so proud meant nothing to them whatever. He was just a poor white boy in trouble and it was not in the least original of him to come running to the niggers.

This sentiment had sometimes seemed to stare out at him from the eyes of Rufus. He had refused to see it, for he had insisted that he and Rufus were equals. They were friends, far beyond the reach of anything so banal and corny as color. They had slept together, got drunk together, balled chicks together, cursed each other out, and loaned each other money. And yet how much, as it turned out, had each kept hidden in his heart from the other! It had all been a game, a game in which Rufus had lost his life. All of the pressures that each had denied had gathered together and killed him. Why had it been necessary to deny anything? What had been the point of the game? He turned into the room again and lit a cigarette and walked up and down. Well, perhaps they had been afraid that if they looked too closely into one another each would have found— he looked out of the window, feeling damp and frightened. Each would have found the abyss. Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white. Somewhere in his heart Vivaldo had feared and hated Rufus because he was black. They had balled chicks together, once or twice the same chick— why? And what had it done to them? And then they never saw the girl again. And they never really talked about it.

Once, while he was in the service, he and a colored buddy had been drunk, and on leave, in Munich. They were in a cellar someplace, it was very late at night, there were candles on the tables. There was one girl sitting near them. Who had dared whom? Laughing, they had opened their trousers and shown themselves to the girl. To the girl, but also to each other. The girl had calmly moved away, saying that she did not understand Americans. But perhaps she had understood them well enough. She had understood that their by-play had had very little to do with her. But neither could it be said that they had been trying to attract each other— they would never, certainly, have dreamed of doing it that way. Perhaps they had merely been trying to set their minds at ease; at ease as to which of them was the better man. And what had the black boy thought then? But the question was, What had
he
thought? He had thought, Hell, I’m doing all right. There might have been the faintest pang caused by the awareness that his colored buddy was doing possibly a little better than that, but, indeed, in the main, he had been relieved. It was out in the open, practically on the goddamn table, and it was just like his, there was nothing frightening about it.

He smiled—
I bet mine’s bigger than yours is
— but remembered occasional nightmares in which this same vanished buddy pursued him through impenetrable forests, came at him with a knife on the edge of precipices, threatened to hurl him down steep stairs to the sea. In each of the nightmares he wanted revenge. Revenge for what?

He sat down again at his worktable. The page on the typewriter stared up at him, full of hieroglyphics. He read it over. It meant nothing whatever. Nothing was happening on that page. He walked back to the window. It was daylight now, and there were people on the streets, the expected, daytime people. The tall girl, with the bobbed hair and spectacles, wearing a long, loose coat, walked swiftly down the street. The grocery store was open. The old Rumanian who ran it carried in the case of milk which had been deposited on the sidewalk. He thought again that he had better get some sleep. He was seeing Ida today, they were having lunch with Richard and Cass. It was eight o’clock.

He stretched out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought of Ida. He had seen her for the first time about seven years ago. She had been about fourteen. It was a holiday of some kind and Rufus had promised to take her out. And perhaps the reason he had asked Vivaldo to come with him was because Vivaldo had had to loan him the money.
Because I can’t disappoint my sister, man
.

It had been a day rather like today, bright, cold, and hard. Rufus had been unusually silent and he, too, had been uncomfortable. He felt that he was forcing himself in where he did not belong. But Rufus had made the invitation and he had accepted; neither of them could get out of it now.

They had reached the house around one o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Scott had opened the door. She was dressed as though she, too, were going out, in a dark gray dress a little too short for her. Her hair was short but had lately been treated with the curling iron. She kissed Rufus lightly on the cheek.

“Hey, there,” she said, “how’s my bad boy?”

“Hey, yourself,” said Rufus, grinning. There was an expression on his face which Vivaldo had never seen before. It was a kind of teasing flush of amusement and pleasure: as though his mother, standing there in her high heels, her gray dress, and with her hair all curled, had just done something extraordinarily winning. And this flush was repeated in his mother’s darker face as she smiled— gravely— back at him. She seemed to take him in from top to toe and to know exactly how he had been getting along with the world.

“This here’s a friend of mine,” Rufus said, “Vivaldo.”

“How do you do?” She gave him her hand, briefly. The brevity was not due to discourtesy or coldness, simply to lack of habit. Insofar as she saw him at all, she saw him as Rufus’ friend, one of the inhabitants of the world in which her son had chosen to live. “Sit down, do. Ida’ll be right out.”

“She ready?”

“Lord, she been getting ready for days. Done drove me nearly wild.” They sat down. Vivaldo sat near the window which looked out on a dirty back yard and the back fire escape of other buildings. Across the way, a dark man sat in front of his half-open window, staring out. In spite of the cold, he wore nothing but an undershirt. There was nothing in the yard except cans, bottles, papers, filth, and a single tree. “If anything had happened and you hadn’t showed up, I hate to think of the weeping and wailing that would have gone on in this house.” She paused and looked toward the door which led to the rest of the apartment. “Maybe you boys like a little beer while you waiting?”

“That all you got to offer us?” Rufus asked, with a smile. “Where’s Bert?”

“Bert’s down to the store and he ain’t back yet. You know how your father is. He going to be sorry he missed you.” She turned to Vivaldo. “Would you like a glass of beer, son? I’m sorry we ain’t got nothing else—”

“Oh, beer’s fine,” said Vivaldo, looking at Rufus, “I’d love a glass of beer.”

She rose and walked into the kitchen. “What your friend do? He a musician?”

“Naw,” said Rufus, “he ain’t got no talent.”

Vivaldo blushed. Mrs. Scott returned with a quart bottle of beer and three glasses. She had a remarkably authoritative and graceful walk. “Don’t you mind my boy,” she said, “he’s just full of the devil, he can’t help it. I been trying to knock it out of him, but I ain’t had much luck.” She smiled at Vivaldo as she poured his beer. “You look kind of shy. Don’t you be shy. You just feel as welcome here as if you was in your own house, you hear?” And she handed him his glass.

“Thank you,” said Vivaldo. He took a swallow of the beer, thinking she’d probably be surprised to know how unwelcome he felt in his own house. And then, again, perhaps she wouldn’t be surprised at all.

“You look as though you dressed up to go out someplace, too, old lady.”

“Oh,” she said, deprecatingly, “I’m just going down the block to see Mrs. Braithwaite. You remember her girl, Vickie? Well, she done had her baby. We going to the hospital to visit her.”

“Vickie got a baby?
Already?
”

“Well, the young folks don’t wait these days, you know that.” She laughed and sipped her beer.

Rufus looked over at Vivaldo with a frown. “Damn,” he said. “How’s she doing?”

“Pretty well— under the
circumstances
.” Her pause suggested that the circumstances were grim. “She had a right fine boy, weighed seven pounds.” She was about to say more; but Ida entered.

She was already quite tall, nearly as tall as she was going to be. She, too, had been dealing in hot combs and curling irons, Vivaldo’s later impression that she had been in pigtails was due to the fact that her hair had been curled tightly all over her head. The dress she wore was long and blue and full, of some rustling material which billowed above her long legs.

She came into the room, looking only at her brother, with an enormous, childlike smile. He and Rufus stood up.

“You see, I got here,” said Rufus, smiling, and he and his sister kissed each other on the cheek. Their mother stood watching them with a proud, frowning smile.

“I see you did,” said Ida, moving a little away from him, and laughing. Her delight in seeing her brother was so real that Vivaldo felt a kind of anguish, thinking of his own house, his own sister. “I been
wondering
if you’d make it— you keep so
busy
all the time.”

She said the last with a wry, proud, grownup exasperation, as one submitting to the penalties imposed by her brother’s power and glory. She had not looked at Vivaldo, though she was vividly aware of him. But Vivaldo would not exist until Rufus permitted it.

He permitted it now, tentatively, with one hand on his sister’s neck. He turned her toward Vivaldo. “I brought a friend of mine along, Vivaldo Moore. This is my sister, Ida.”

They shook hands. Her handshake was as brief as her mother’s had been, but stronger. And she looked at Vivaldo differently, as though he were a glamorous stranger, glamorous not only in himself and his color but in his scarcely to-be-imagined relation to her brother.

“Well, now, where,” asked Rufus, teasingly, “do you think you’d like to go, young lady?”

And he watched her, grinning. But there was a constraint in the room now, too, which had not been there before, which had entered with the girl who would soon be a woman. She stood there like a target and a prize, the natural prey of someone— somewhere— who would soon be on her trail.

“Oh, I don’t care,” she said. “Anywhere you-all want to go.”

“But you so dressed up— you sure you ain’t ashamed to be seen with us?”

He was also dressed up, in his best dark suit and a shirt and tie he had borrowed from Vivaldo.

Ida and her mother laughed. “Boy, you stop teasing your sister,” said Mrs. Scott.

“Well, go on, get your coat,” Rufus said, “and we’ll make tracks.”

“We going
far?
”

“We going far enough for you to have to wear a
coat
.”

“She don’t mean is you going far,” said Mrs. Scott. “She trying to find out
where
you going and what time you coming back.”

Ida had moved to the door by which she had entered and stood there, hesitating. “Go on,” her mother said, “get your coat and mine, too. I’m going to walk down the block with you.”

Ida left and Mrs. Scott smiled and said, “If she thought I was coming with you today, she be
highly
displeased. She want you all to herself today.”

She picked up the empty beer glasses and carried them into the kitchen. “When they were younger,” she said to Vivaldo, “Rufus just couldn’t do no wrong, far as Ida was concerned.” She ran water to rinse out the glasses. “She always been real afraid of the dark, you know? but, shucks, honey, many’s the time Ida used to crawl out of her bed, middle of the night, and go running through this dark house to get in bed with Rufus. Look like she just felt
safe
with him. I don’t know why, Rufus sure didn’t pay her much mind.”