New Boy (16 page)

It was almost midnight when the train arrived in town. A few colored soldiers got off with me, although I didn't recognize any of them. I got my suitcase and stepped down onto the nearly deserted platform and started to walk toward the station. There was a fizz of steam escaping, and as I walked through the vapor and the lingering odors of diesel fuel and body sweat, I could see my parents up ahead, inside the station. They were standing next to each other, smiling and waving at me. When I entered the station, my mother rushed over and hugged me, and my father took my suitcase from my hand.

"Well, look who's here," he said, "finally come back home."

"Did you have a good trip?" asked my mother.

"It was okay," I said. "A lot of marines got on the train just outside Washington and they were singing and carrying on most of the way here. Quite a few of them were colored."

"Must have come from Quantico," said Dad. "Big marine base up there. Were they acting up?"

"No," I said. "They were fine. One of them had a portable radio and everybody was listening and singing along. Some of the white marines were singing, too."

"You don't say," said my father. "I never heard
that
before."

"Did you have anything to eat on the train?" said Mother. "I've got some tuna casserole in the oven if you're hungry." We walked out of the station toward the parking lot.

"I had a quick bite in New York when I switched trains," I said. "I'll see how I feel when I get home." It was warm outside and a soft breeze was blowing through the parking lot. The cold weather had already arrived in Connecticut, and the warm Virginia air felt good. Dad opened the trunk of the Roadmaster and put my suitcase inside, and we headed home. Main Street was almost deserted but the streetlights were on, as were strings of Christmas lights, wrapped around the lampposts like glowing serpents. At the top of each lamppost was an illuminated lantern of the head of Santa Claus with rosy cheeks and a jolly smile, which seemed to be suspended in midair. A couple of old white men in shabby clothes were stumbling along and looking in the windows of storefronts, and in several of the windows there were big posters announcing a Christmas Eve rally at the fairgrounds.

COME ON OUT
TO THE STATE FAIRGROUNDS
TO SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR STATES RIGHTS!

The posters were printed in bold black letters with a big picture of the Confederate flag underneath and "Merry Christmas!" at the bottom. All along Main Street, there were beauty parlors and clothing stores and coffee shops that I had been told were forbidden territory, and as we continued, we passed Pritchard's, the biggest department store in town, with its display windows dressed for the Christmas season and a poster for the rally in the corner of each one. Finally, at the end of Main Street I saw the sparkling lights of the Hippodrome, the only colored movie theater in town. I spent many Saturday afternoons as a child seated in its clammy darkness, transfixed by second- and third-run films, biblical epics like
The Robe
and
The Ten Commandments,
Westerns during which we would always root for the Indians, and horror movies that made me afraid to leave my seat and go home in the daylight.

The streets were dark and empty when we arrived in our neighborhood. The colored lights and Santa Claus lanterns were missing from the lampposts and all of the shops were dark. There were lights on in a pool hall, however, and through the windows I could see a couple of fellows with cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, leaning over the tables with their sticks to line up shots, but otherwise it seemed that everyone had gone home for the night. I thought of Harlem and the stream of people flowing endlessly along 125th Street, the late-night crowd at Jinxie's listening to Coleman Hawkins blow the roof off the place, and that cute waitress working her way between the tables to take orders for drinks, and I wished that I, too, was there.

Dad parked the car in our driveway and we got out. I took my
suitcase from the trunk and we entered our house, as usual, through the back door. It was a brick ranch house with an attached garage and a screened-in porch that looked out onto the back yard, which contained a picnic table and a patio and a brick barbecue pit and pink crepe myrtle trees and blue hydrangeas that my mother had planted. When we walked into the kitchen, Dad said he was tired and went off to get ready for bed, but my mother stayed with me. As I stood in the kitchen and looked around, it felt as though I had never left. The air in the kitchen was heavy with the smell of tuna casserole, and it seemed as though the fluorescent fixture overhead had frozen everything in place, the kitchen table and chairs, the refrigerator and the stove, even the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl all preserved in the lavender light.

"Son, are you sure you wouldn't like something to eat?" said my mother, removing the casserole from the oven with a hot pad. I always found it hard to resist my mother's tuna casserole. She made it with two kinds of melted cheese on top.

"How can I say no?" I said, taking my customary seat, which had already been set for me, in the middle of the kitchen table. I opened my napkin and put it on my lap, and my mother took a plate from the cabinet and served me a large helping.

"Anything to drink?" she said, setting the plate down between my knife and fork.

"I wouldn't mind a glass of milk," I said, and dug into the casserole. How many times had I sat at the kitchen table, anchored under my mother's watchful gaze, feeling the warmth of
her love and the deep sense of security only her presence could convey. Even now, when I had broken away and had returned home for a visit, I could still feel the force of that presence. I wondered, for a moment, if my dislike of Draper and my thoughts of returning home were the result of no longer having her constant presence in my life or the result of my discovery that Draper was not everything I expected it to be. At the same time, I knew I could not be one of those sons who never leave home, like Sylvester Reese. Occasionally, my parents and I visited his home on a Sunday afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Reese were old friends of my parents. They raised five children, all of whom, except Sylvester, were married with children of their own and living outside the house. Mrs. Reese was a spindly, light-skinned lady with gray hair who would greet us at the door and invite us inside to sit in the living room. She would bring out a pitcher of iced tea and water glasses, and she and Mr. Reese, a retired Pullman porter with a face the color of gingerbread, would make small talk about the heat until an awkward moment :when Sylvester, a grown man wearing pajamas and slippers in the middle of the afternoon, sporadically employed and devoid of prospects would appear in the living room to pay his respects to the guests with a sheepish grin, before quickly retreating to his room like a house pet. After he had disappeared, his parents would resume talking about the weather, as though Sylvester was just visiting for a few days, when everyone knew he had never left.

"Tell me, Robby, have you thought about what you want to do while you're here?" said Mother. "A lot of your friends have been asking about you. I saw Roosevelt and a few others at church a few weeks ago and they wanted to know when you were coming back." She poured me a glass of milk from the bottle in the refrigerator and brought it over to the table and handed it to me.

"I'd like to see Russell and find out about that group he's working with," I said. "Have you heard anything more about them?"

"Haven't heard a thing," she said, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips. "Nothing's changed around here. The white folks say they'll fight to the end to keep things just the way they are. The courts don't seem to be able to get them to change. I don't know what a group of kids can do."

I finished my casserole and my milk and washed the plate and glass and put them on the drying rack. I was dog-tired. "You haven't lost your touch with tuna casserole," I said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. She smiled and wrapped her arms around me, and I felt the way I did as a child, when I had come home with straight As on my report card and she hugged me with joy, while I yearned to go outside and play before it got too dark.

"I'm so glad to have you home," she said as she hugged me. "It isn't the same without you."

It was as if I was caught in an undertow, and I felt myself drawing away from her. "What's wrong, son?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" I said. "Mom, I'm fine." I gently extracted myself from her embrace. Part of me didn't want to be at home at all, and part of me wanted to collapse into her arms and tell her everything, that Draper was not what it seemed, that the students were cruel snobs who tormented each other for fun while the faculty looked the other way, that the headmaster was a toady for the wealthy benefactors and, other than the names of a few well-known colored athletes,just as she had said, no one at school, except Gordie, knew anything about Negroes, or seemed the least bit interested in finding out about us.

"I don't know what it is," she said. "You seem different. Is there something on your mind?"

"Nothing's wrong, Mom," I said, smiling weakly. She looked unconvinced. "Everything's fine. I'm just tired. I've got to get some sleep." I retreated into my bedroom and turned on the light, and I had the strange feeling that my room had been preserved under a glass dome. My bed was neatly made and still covered with a Brooklyn Dodgers bedspread. A framed picture of Jackie Robinson stealing home was still on my desk where I had done my homework. The knotty-pine paneling my father put up when I was in grade school was still on the walls. Like the rest of the house, the room was neat as a pin, not a speck of dust anywhere. My books were carefully arranged in the bookcase, the ten-volume
Collier's Encyclopedia
I used to write my papers for school,
The Almanac of Negro History,
the
Hammond Atlas of the World
I received from my parents as a present on my twelfth birthday, and the book
When A Boy Grows Up,
which
they had given me on my thirteenth. Even some of the books my mother had read to me as a child,
Toby
and
Make Way for Ducklings
and
Hopalong Cassidy Rides Again,
were there. When I opened my bureau, I found all of the clothes I had left behind, most of which were too small for me now, neatly folded and arranged in the drawers. It was as if I had never left.

I went off to the bathroom and quickly washed up, and on my way back to my bedroom, I called out goodnight and received two muffled replies. The door to my parents' bedroom had been left open a crack, and I could hear them chatting softly, lying in the dark on their bed, into which I was sometimes admitted as a child, when a bad dream awakened me in the night or the sun in the early morning.

In my room, I switched off the light and climbed into bed. I thought again about telling Mom what Draper was really like, but I knew that if I did, she would tell my father to cancel his patients and she would call in sick at her school, and she and Dad would put me in the back of the Roadmaster and drive me back to Draper after New Year's Day, straight through the night if necessary, and when we arrived the next morning, she would lead the way, marching into Mr. Spencer's office unannounced, cataloguing my complaints and
demanding
an explanation, and Spencer would be seated behind his desk, unruffled, smiling and puffing on his pipe, as if he had expected us, and he would offer us seats across from him in grand wing chairs and patiently explain that the world of Draper is no different from the world at
large. "We are in the business of developing character," he would say; "we offer our boys an opportunity to develop the inner strength to handle any situation they will encounter in life." And we would listen intently, and when the subject of "the Mazzerelli lad" came up, Spencer would decline to discuss the details "to protect the boy's privacy," but he would assure us that the situation was much more complicated than it appeared, and he would smile again, baring his crooked teeth, and offer us the use of his private bathroom, scented with the fragrance of sandalwood soap, to wash up after such a long trip, and each of us would gratefully accept, and when we were all seated once more across from him at his desk, a magnificent desk of carved walnut with brass fittings and a green leather top, my parents would look to me, at last, for my final decision on Draper. And what could I say? After everything they had done to get me this far, the matter of my leaving had already been decided. No, I couldn't tell my mother the truth, whatever that really was. And on that night, as I had on so many others, I pulled the blue covers over my shoulders like a cloak and fell asleep under the banner of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"So how you like it up there, anyway?" said Russell. We were sitting in the kitchen at my house before noon on the day before Christmas Eve, drinking iced tea and catching up with each other. Russell and I had been good friends since grade school, although our parents didn't know each other well. Russell's parents were not professionals. His father owned a small variety store and a laundromat next door. His mother worked in the store behind the counter making change, and sometimes Russell did, too. Neither one of his parents had gone beyond high school, but they were hard-working people who had managed to save enough to buy a house a few blocks away from ours. Russell looked the same, lanky and brown-skinned with those hooded eyes and a wispy mustache that made it seem like he wanted to look older.

"It's okay," I said, in a noncommittal voice.

"Your mother said you're getting the grades," said Russell, rattling the ice cubes in his glass. Mom was somewhere in the house, but I could imagine her standing in the dining room with
her hands behind her back, pretending to be looking out the window.

"I'm working at it, man," I said. "The schoolwork isn't the hard part. The hard part is just being there."

"You the only one of us up there, right?"said Russell.