Erasure (44 page)

He smiled at me and said nothing.

“How much?” I asked. “A hundred?” I had my money out of my pocket. “Two?” His face didn’t change. “I’ve got two-fifty. I’ll give it to you if the address is correct.”

“What if I just kick your ass and take it.”

“That wouldn’t be as easy as just taking me there.”

A nasty, wicked smile filled his ugly face and it made me hate him. I wasn’t sure if he was finishing his boot tying so that he could beat me up or to take me to Gretchen’s.

“Let’s go,” he said.

And so we walked from his building several blocks to another brownstone. For a fat man his pace was decent, though he panted alarmingly. I bristled at the thought of trying to resuscitate him should he collapse. The while I worried that he would turn and punch me or that we would happen onto some of his neo-Nazi pals and that I would be left for dead. Just a pause here to point out that if my mood before this was dark, by now it was pitch and dour, and I perceived it as pernicious itself, attacking me as much as the situation. This man was in fact related to me. He was the cousin of my half sister, which by my reckoning made him my half-cousin-by-law-once-removed, granted not a close relation, but close enough to sicken me some considerable measure.

“She’s on the third floor,” the skinhead said. “Her last name is Hanley.” He held his red-knuckled hand out open for the cash. I gave him the money and watched him walk away. At the corner he glanced back at me with that grin.

Up the steps, I found the name
Gretchen Hanley
on the box and pressed the bell.

“Who is it?” a woman answered through the intercom.

“Ms. Hanley?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Thelonious Ellison. I’d like to talk with you.”

There was a long pause, then the door buzzed. I reached for it quickly and entered the building, which had fallen into a sadder state than her cousin’s building. I hadn’t noticed before, but the day had turned hot and so with all the walking and climbing I had become rather sweaty and somewhat disheveled. I tucked in my shirt, took in a deep breath and knocked.

If there was a family resemblance, it was lost to my eye. Gretchen was in fact an attractive woman, wide in the shoulder and hips and tallish, with light brown hair which fell past her shoulder and hazel eyes. A baby cried in the corner and after opening the door, she turned to see to it.

“Gretchen?” I said.

“Yes, that’s my name.” There was an edge on her voice. “What can I do for you?” I could hear her accent.

“My father was Benjamin Ellison,” I said.

She was holding the child now so that its face was at her shoulder. She looked at me. Her back was to the window and I could not read her expression.

“Your mother’s name was Fiona?”

“Yes.” She stepped closer and looked at my face. “So, you’re my brother.” She smiled and I could detect ever so faintly a likeness to her skinhead cousin. “So, is our old man dead yet?”

“Yes, he is.”

That seemed to unscrew her slightly and she sat down at the table, rocked the baby.

“If it makes any difference,” I said, “my father never knew where you were. He died about seven years ago. I didn’t know about you and your mother until I found some letters.”

She stared at me. Then I realized she was looking at my clothes. I looked around the apartment and saw that she was living badly. The place was clean enough, but it wore the scars of hard times. The Formica-topped table might have seemed chic in a bright, suburban kitchen, but there it served as merely a log, the dents and blemishes marking memories. Just looking at the sofa, I knew that the reverse sides of the cushions were even more stained.

“This is my granddaughter,” she said. “I watch her while my daughter works. Then I go to work. Tomorrow will be the same and the day after even more the same. What do you do, Mr. Ellison?”

“I’m a writer.”

“How wonderful.” She looked at the baby’s face, touched it with her finger. “A writer. Did you go to college?”

“I did.”

“How nice. I suppose you learned a lot in college.” The baby made a another crying sound and she shushed him somewhat roughly. “Support the Negro College Fund, I always say.”

I didn’t like the woman, but her bitterness didn’t and shouldn’t have surprised me. “Anyway,” I said, “my father wrote you this letter before he died. I recently found it and so I tracked you down.” I put the letter on the table in front of her.

She looked at it, but did not reach for it.

I sat down in the chair closest to me and studied her face. A terrible sense of loneliness came over me and I was hard put to understand whether it was an empathetic response to Gretchen or simply my own feeling. I also felt responsible, however wrongly, for the poverty in the room with me.

“So, you’re my brother.”

I nodded.

“Do I have other brothers and sisters?”

“You have another brother. Your sister is dead.” I looked at the dirty window. “I didn’t mean to come and stir up bad feelings for you. My father left his letters to be found and I was the one who read them. From what I can see, he loved your mother very much. I think he wanted to find you, but didn’t know how.”

“You found me.”

She was quite right and to that I had no satisfactory reply.

“Father wanted you to have this money.” I took out my checkbook and pen.

“Money?”

I could not tell if she was surprised or offended, but I twisted the point of the pen out and continued. “Yes, Ms. Hanley, my father left you some money.” I wrote out a check for one hundred thousand dollars and handed it to her, to my astonishment without hesitation. I’d never before written a check near that large and it felt strange, dizzying.

“My goodness,” she said, not looking at the check. “Money, how about that? And that makes it all okay, does it?” She glanced about her home, seeming to take it in, seeming to draw my attention to the conditions of her life.

“I don’t think so.” I stood. “But that’s all I’m here to do. Well, good luck,” I said, turned and walked out of her apartment.

She came to the door and opened it after me. “This is real?”

“Yes.”

Now, if you pitch your little tent along the broad highway

The board of Sanitation says, “Sorry, you can’t stay.”

“Come on, come on, get movin’,” it’s the ever-lasting cry

Can’t stay, can’t go back and can’t migrate so where the hell am I?

I chose to walk back to the hotel, having no money left for a taxi, and refusing to sink even lower to the tunnels of the subway. The exercise, however, did little to clear my head. The consideration of my newly found branch of the family generated new levels of irony and resonance to my plight as Stagg Leigh. Sitting in Gretchen’s apartment, I was reminded of my sister’s clinic, of the women seated in the waiting area, of the babies in their laps, of the toddlers picking at the nap of the carpet. I stopped at the window of a small gallery and looked at the photographs in the front display, dreary photos, wide-angled, cold depictions of a typical though anonymous waterfront. There were no people in the pictures, only ships and cranes and concrete and water. The photographer’s name was Brockton and I wondered what he had done with the people, how he had cleaned his canvas so completely.

I walked on and above a warehouse I saw a billboard, which attracted my attention only for its spanking newness:

KEEP AMERICA PURE

Stagg Leigh leaves his hotel room, 1369, dressed casually in black shoes, black trousers, black turtleneck sweater, black blazer, black beard, black fedora. Stagg Leigh is black from toe to top of head, from shoulder to shoulder, from now until both ends of time. He bops down the carpeted hallway to the elevator, down again, farther down, down.

precibus infimis

The elevator doors close, metal doors meeting edge to edge. Inside is an older black man dressed in a modest, brown suit. He presses the lobby button, then regards the lighted panel in front of him, watching the floor badges illuminate in descending sequence. Without looking at Stagg, he asks, “Are you an engineer?”

“An
engineer?”

“Yeah, that’s what I asked you,” he says, challengingly.

“No, sir, I’m no engineer.”

“Too bad,” the old man says. The doors slide open.

As the man steps out of the car, Stagg says, “In fact, in a way, I am.” But the man is gone.

ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?

Ailene Hoover boards the car, presses the button, though it has obviously already been pressed. She does not look at Stagg’s eyes, but he feels her making note of his color, his one color, his size, his long fingers, his large feet. She wears too much perfume, smells of gardenias. She touches the heart-shaped pendant which hangs around her neck. Then she turns a suspicious smile to Stagg, asks, “Do I know you?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“‘There is something familiar about you.”

“Really? I suppose I have one of those faces.”

“Yes that must be it.”

The doors open.

medio tutissimus ibis

Stagg takes the subway, the underground, to the studio, realizing as the train rumbles that so does his stomach. He is starving. Other stomachs rumble. He is encased with other black men. Though it is a golden day outside, they cruise below the world to their destinations.

At the studio, Stagg is met by a man named Tod Weiß, a young man, dressed nicely, his hands soft when they shake. But Weiß is sure of himself. He is the producer and when he snaps his fingers, somebody jumps. He wears a large smile and runs his fingers through his hair.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” Weiß says. “If you hadn’t made it I don’t know what we would have done. We were told that maybe you wouldn’t show up, but here you are. It’s wonderful. Love the book. Come on, I’ll take you to makeup.”

“No makeup,” Stagg says, his voice flat, black.

“But this is television.”

“I’ll be behind the screen anyway.”

“That is very true. You know I hadn’t considered that fact.” Weiß grabs a passing assistant, “Go find a screen, pronto.” Then to Stagg, “I’ve got a thousand and one things to take care of. Dana will take care of you.”