Lonely Crusade (18 page)

She did not reply and nervously he lit a cigarette. If she had made the opening then, he would have told her all. It was bursting in his heart to tell her. And if she had known that this was so, she would have made the opening if it killed her. For at this moment, more than anything in all the world, she wanted him to talk to her, lean on her, confide in her, as once he had always done. For in his distress she was his haven, wouldn’t he remember that? For to be his haven gave her the strength to be his slave, and that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? And that was the road to happiness again, she knew. But like Lee, she did not know the words to make the opening, and there they stopped, two people with the one desire separated by perhaps no more than a single little gesture.

As the silence ran on, weighted with this yearning, he could not stand it. “Goddamnit, what are you mad about?” he said defensively. “You stay out all hours of night on your job.”

“I’m not angry, Lee.” She too was defensive. “I was just worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. About everything. I thought maybe something had happened to you.”

“What could happen to me at a party of Jewish Communists?”

“I thought maybe you had been run over by an automobile, or had been arrested, or gotten beaten up or something.” Her face contained an odd expression of guilt, as if she had committed a sin by worrying. “I can’t help but worry when you stay out like that.”

Now his defensiveness ran out into soft contrition. “You shouldn’t worry like that, Ruth. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Damn! I just went to a party.”

And then he thought of Jackie and his breath caught up short.

“I know it sounds silly,” she said, “but I can’t help it. You worry too. Just worrying—about anything, everything!” She took a sighing breath. “I never know, Lee. I just can’t ever tell—anything might happen. I don’t want to worry, but with you keyed up and tense all the time—” And suddenly she was crying; tears streamed down her face into her coffee and her quivering lips looked swollen.

She touched him then. He went over and put his arm about her shoulder. “I’m sorry, baby doll.”

She buried her face against his stomach and beneath his hand her body shook with sobbing. “I suppose there’re a lot of people afraid in the world, but I don’t want to be afraid.” She beat her clenched fists spasmodically on the table top. “I don’t want to be afraid! I don’t want ever to be afraid, Lee.”

“You don’t have to be afraid, baby doll,” he said, trying to console her.

“I’m always afraid,” she sobbed. “You make me afraid, Lee.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve just always been afraid with you and I wasn’t afraid before.” She sobbed hysterically. “I don’t want to be afraid, Lee.”

“What do I do?”

“Nothing, Lee; it’s nothing you do, it’s nothing at all. It’s just me, it’s all in me.”

“Are you afraid without me?”

“I’m not afraid on my job.” And she looked up as if in wonder. “No, I’m not. And when I’m around other people, I’m not afraid. What is it, Lee? What’s wrong with us?”

He took a long, deep breath to steady the hurt in him, and when he spoke there was only the lie in his voice: “I don’t know, Ruth.” Because he knew what was wrong with them was only what was wrong with himself.

“I don’t want to be such a cry baby.” Her voice came muffled through his robe. “But I get so scared, Lee. And when you’re scared too I can tell it, and that makes me worse. I never told you, Lee, but I didn’t sleep a wink all the time we stayed at old man Harding’s. Remember how we both used to get—you did too, I knew—just that sort of crazy trepidation. I feel that always now with you.”

“Don’t cry, baby doll, don’t cry,” he said. The sobbing of her body beneath his hand was like his own requiem. “Don’t cry.” After a silence he added: “I didn’t sleep either.”

“What is it, Lee? Do you know?”

“I wish I did,” Lee said, gone now down the bitter road of memory.

They had gone to live in old man Harding’s house the second year of their marriage before he began work on WPA. The old man had been one of several dishwashers at a hotel where he was bussing dishes. At the first tray of dishes he had lugged in from the dining-room, the old man had snapped at him: “Don’t put those dishes there!”

He had put down the tray and from it picked a heavy salt-cellar. “If you say another word to me, I’ll knock out your brains!” he had threatened.

Several days later old man Harding had reproached him, “You shouldn’t talk to an old man like you did, son.”

“Well, let an old man tend to his own business.”

“You don’t like this work?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I didn’t like it either when I first started. I’m a watchmaker by profession,” he had added proudly.

“Why aren’t you working at it?”

“My hands.” The old man had spread his gnarled and twisted fingers. “Oh, I don’t mind it now. As soon as I get enough money, I’m going home to see my boy.”

From that had grown a strange friendship. Between trays they had talked a little, and Lee had told him of his hopes and ambitions and had listened to the old man talk of the man he once had been. After a week they had begun eating together in the dining-room for the help off from the kitchen, and Lee had told the old man of his wonderful wife and the places where they had had to live.

Old man Harding had felt sorry for him, but he did not discover it until Harding was about to leave for Altoona, Pennsylvania, to visit his son. He had offered Lee the use of his house while he was gone.

“Leastways, you and your wife can have a place of your own till I get back.”

“Your home?”

“It’s not much, but it’s mine.”

“Well—” Lee had not known just how to thank him.

But the old man had not wanted thanks. “Young married people ought to have a place to themselves,” was the way he had put it.

Lee had never thought of the old man as being white—probably because he had been a dishwasher—until he and Ruth moved into the old man’s house and felt lost in a strange neighborhood, fifteen minutes from the streetcar line, an hour and a half from downtown, and cut off from the black world.

It was a run-down, unpainted shack overgrown with crawling Jose vines, weeds, and wild geraniums, located in City Terrace, far out in the northeast section of the city. Outside, the underbrush teemed with garter snakes, gophers, lizards, and lice, and inside through the dry, faded wallpaper, cracked and peeling from the walls, and in and out the crumbling cupboards and dilapidated furnishings, rats played a slithering cacophony.

In his twenty years of ownership, old man Harding had never installed gas or electricity and had depended for water on a spigot in the backyard. There was a small coal stove in the kitchen and a tumble-down outhouse in the weeds at the back of the lot.

On both sides were vacant lots also overgrown with weeds. Beyond, going up the hill toward the reservoir, lived Mexicans, and going down toward City Terrace Drive, lived Jews. Several families of white Southern migrants lived on the cutoff circling down behind.

Ruth had hated the place on sight—the filth and the lack of sanitation and modern conveniences, and all the hard, drudging work that had to be done to make it livable. But they could save rent, she had reasoned, and the cheap Jewish markets were near by, so they had prepared to make the best of it.

At first it had been the creaking, ghostly noises in the middle of the night, the slithering of lizards across the roof, the horrible gnawing of rats as if any minute they would come through the walls and devour them both alive.

Then she had almost stepped on a snake on the back porch that first Monday morning. After that she had refused to venture through the dense undergrowth as far as the backhouse, and before they could find a diaper pot she had contracted constipation.

The second night one of the white women who lived behind them had frightened Ruth terribly by picking her way down the front walk with a flashlight. Ruth had seen the light and had come screaming to him: “Somebody’s coming! Somebody’s coming!”

The woman had heard her. “It’s only me, a neighbor,” she had called.

Lee had welcomed her in, but Ruth, in the reaction from her fright, had been hostile. But the woman had merely called, she said, to warn them that the Jewish people down below were trying to get the white people to drive them from the neighborhood.

“That Mrs. Friedman called to tell me some colored people had moved in here and if we didn’t get ‘em out the price of our property would go down. I told her: ‘So what, the price of our property ain’t worth nothing nohow and the colored people got to live somewhere.’”

Then Tuesday afternoon before Lee had returned from work, Mrs. Finklestein had caught Ruth alone and had warned her that the white people in back were planning to do something to them.

That night they lay awake as they had lain awake the night before. Now in addition to their fear of the dark and the noises, the rats and the snakes, had come the fear of white people scheming against them. But they did not want each other to know they were awake—lying there in a dry sweat, each simulating sleep, lying rigid until their bodies ached. At the slightest sound carefully raising their heads on aching necks to free both ears for listening, their breath catching in their lungs, hurting in their diaphragms.

For seven nights they did not sleep—taut and rigid from dusk to dawn, afraid to turn over to relieve aching muscles lest the other know, afraid to get up to relieve their urges.

“Are you asleep, baby doll?”

“Ho-hum! I was but I just woke up.”

“I was, too. But since I woke up I can’t go back to sleep.”

“Did you hear something?”

“No, just the noises of this old broken-down house. What?”

“I thought I heard somebody.”

“There’s nobody around, go back to sleep.”

Or they had quarreled.

“Why don’t you go to sleep, Ruth?”

“I can’t help it if I can’t sleep.”

“You’re keeping me awake.”

“I don’t see how I’m keeping you awake just because I can’t sleep.”

“You keep twisting and turning and shaking the bed.”

“The rats were gnawing. And I heard something.”

“There isn’t anything to be afraid of.”

“I’m not exactly afraid.”

“Well, if you’re not afraid why don’t you go to sleep?”

“I keep hearing something.”

“Goddamnit, there isn’t anything to hear!”

Hearing it, himself. Hearing it in his mind and in his aching chest and in his hurting diaphragm. Hearing it in his breathless trepidation, in his waiting for it to happen. Lying there waiting for the white people to come and do something to him.

Hearing them coming every night, every moment of the night. Crouching at his door. Tiptoeing across his porch. Putting dynamite underneath his room. Setting fire to his kitchen. Throwing a snake through his window.

He didn’t believe that anyone was going to bother them. This was Los Angeles, California, where the police answered a call for help in three minutes, he had told himself. It was senseless to think anyone was going to bother them. He did not believe it. But he had feared it.

If you have never lain sleepless for seven straight nights, your navel drawing into your spine at the slightest sound, your throat muscles contracting into painful stricture, terrified by the thought of people whom you have never seen and might never see, then you would not understand. Living in the world, outnumbered and out-powered by a race whom you think wants to hurt you at every opportunity—During that time no one else spoke to them, no one had harmed them in any way. No notes had been left in the mailbox. No letters had been scrawled on the door. No rocks had been hurled through the window. There had been no necessity for it. On the eighth day they had left. Just the simple suggestion in their minds, and it had driven them away.

Now holding her sobbing face against his flattened stomach, he was scared all over again. The fear of white people wanting to do something to him came back to lurk in the corners of his mind. Because what was Jackie’s motive, after all? Were the Communists planning to frame him in some sort of way?

“Don’t cry, baby doll,” he said consolingly. “Nothing’s going to happen to us. I’m not taking any chances on anything.”

She stopped sobbing and looked up at him. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, Lee.”

He patted her on the head. “Now fix me some coffee.”

When she had poured the cup, she asked again: “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

“No, baby, and please don’t worry.” He started to add: “I love you so much, baby doll, I don’t want you to ever have to worry,” but she spoke first.

“I’ll have to hurry then, or I’ll be late for work.”

“Today?” he asked incredulously. “Today is Sunday.”

“The plant has gone on a seven-day week now.”

“Does that mean you’ll work every Sunday now?”

“Only every other Sunday.”

“But why any Sunday? What’s so important about what you do that—”

“You have your work too Lee,” she interrupted. “If you were asked to work on Sunday you’d go, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would, since you put it that way,” he replied, but the closeness had gone from between them and he did not feel affectionate toward her any more.

For a long time after she had gone he sat there nursing his empty cup. When he discovered that he was thinking of Jackie again he got up and went to bed. Outside the gray was thinning and the sun was struggling through.

He could not go to sleep. The lines kept running through his thoughts: “…only remind you in the midst of these problems of race that seem so serious now…that we must not forget the human race, to which we all belong and which is the major problem after all…and most important of all—men. No one can ask more than that you acquit yourselves like men.”

Well—yes, Lee Gordon thought, Lieutenant Colonel Noel F. Parrish, a white Southern officer. The white Southerners had always known it. And had always been the first to deny it—That Jackie. Just what was her story?

Chapter 11

T
HE AVALON
streetcar was crowded with servicemen and workers, all in the uniform of their participation—the navy’s blue woolen and the workers’ blue denim, the army’s khaki and the workers’ tan.