The Man Who Cried I Am (16 page)

She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Could we live on your writing?” Max recoiled. He had some money in the bank from the folks' house. He hadn't made a dime on his first novel, but had got good money as an advance for his current one, $750. He had socked away his mustering-out pay and was a member in good standing of the 52–20 club, and had disability coming. But. “I don't know. Some of it would be a little rough, but not all of it.”

Lillian hated this; she didn't look at him. She remembered the conversation she had had with her parents. “He's a writer,” she had told them.

“Yes,” her father had said, “but where does he
work?
”

“Couldn't you write nights and work?” Her voice was a little plaintive and she hated it. The stories of writers were romantic and all, but you couldn't eat romance, that kind, sitting around in garrets and drinking Chianti. Besides, who ever heard of a Negro writer making money? The Ames home wasn't so great. The dishes were chipped, the chairs didn't match, the kid was a mess. What happened when people stopped being nice to Harry Ames, where did they go from there? They didn't even teach English very well where Lillian had gone to school, just so some nut wouldn't get the idea that he wanted to be a writer. Now she glanced at Max. “I've gone and spoiled it, haven't I?” She took his hand.

“No,” he said. “I'm so damned full now. I'd hate to lose everything working. I feel free for the first time in my life. What would there be besides the
Democrat?
There aren't that many jobs downtown; things haven't changed that much, Lillian.”

“You could—” she knew she shouldn't be doing this—“teach, or do casework …”

“And if I don't?”

“Then we'll have to work something out.”

Max slumped down into the bed. There were always choices. What choice was there to make? He wanted her. Already it hurt to think of not having her. But Jesus, where in the hell was there a job in New York City for him? Madison Avenue? Park Row? Teaching? Social work, who wanted to do that? That got you right next to
them
again, the ones who hurt so damned much that they spilled over on you, like thick sap from a tree in spring. Get a job? Man, wasn't that like the American dream? Boy meets girl, gets good job and everything's all reet. “Wow, honey,” he said aloud.

Lillian lay on her side of the bed staring at the wall. The black thing she had seen on the hill just before they made love, moved a little, downhill. Now Lillian knew what Charlotte and Harry had seen: a middle-class Negro girl whose father was a bank janitor and whose mother worked for rich theater people on Central Park West. All right. So what? Did that mean that she could ignore security, the crushing desire to have it? Along with love, and she loved Max. But he was black. Of course he was black, but Negro men, they had a way of starting out with a bang, with the long, long dream, but ending with less than a whisper, so beaten were they simply because they had dared to dream in the first place. Max, her Max, was a man with dreams, but he had to see the hard reality of the present. You couldn't eat dreams; they wouldn't even put cheap, gaudy furniture from the 125th Street stores into your home. If you dreamed too much you got hurt. In her classes she could look out on the children and knew that killers were already stalking their dreams. How had Max managed to elude the killers? Suppose Max said no. He wouldn't say no; he couldn't say no, and she knew it as well as he did. Charlotte had seen all this, the whore, white whore.

Max twisted in the sheets. In the final analysis there is always something someone wants. Lillian was special because she never took from him the way others did when they saw him coming; she had asked for nothing, until now. Now what she was asking for might be the most important thing of all and he had no choice but to give it to her.

12

NEW YORK

Winter. Harry Ames stared out the front window at the bleak street. How did he really feel about winter? He tried to bring his thoughts back to work, but he was waiting with foolish anticipation for Max to stop by. He usually did when he was finished with his rounds. Harry looked down at his shoes and they gave him an idea. He'd take all his shoes out of the closet and polish them. Charlotte's too. All the time he'd be thinking about the unfinished paragraph still in the typewriter. Yes, he would polish shoes. Charlotte would be proud of him.

When he had finished the shoes he returned to the typewriter, snappily pulled up his chair, reread the paragraph which paused at a comma. Listlessly his eyes drifted to the pencils on his table. Jesus! They needed sharpening. How come he hadn't seen that before? He took out the five-and-dime sharpener and then, one by one, with the utmost care, he sharpened the pencils. Where the hell was Max?

The
New York Times Book Review
lay under some paper, and Harry picked that up and scanned it again, frowning at the picture of a young Negro novelist whom he had never heard of. It gave him a jolt that the review was what they call “a rave.” He looked at the picture of the plump novelist. Fat face, eyes like slits. Hmmm. Have to get the book, see what this young boy is putting down. Could be a challenger to the Ames prestige. Them white folks: divide and conquer or, divide and pay less money for talent because everyone's scufflin' to get there and takin' pennies for the project.

Too bad, he continued thinking, that the artists were so terribly distrusted by the Party. The Party people never understood what was what about color in America and never understood painters and writers and musicians, only the workers, and as soon as the workers got theirs, to hell with everything. Labor (workers) was going to be one of the Fattest Cats, Harry guessed, when the smoke of the war finally blew over. It had had the foot way inside the door even when the war broke out. The worst kind of tyrant was the one who once had been a victim.

People Harry had known in the Party were complaining these days about the “Iron Curtain.” That Churchill sure had a way of making names stick. Harry's friends complained, but rationalized that the Soviets would soon return to their own borders. They had to stay in those places to help those countries back on their feet, just the way the U.S. was doing. But Harry insisted that the Soviets were there to stay, in Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and all the other places. He didn't have to rationalize; he wasn't in the Party anymore. To hell with those fools who thought there would be a resurgence of power in America. Nowadays it looked like the Communists were coming back big, riding the coattails of the liberal organizations that were being born with the speed of rabbits fornicating against a stop watch. But there were already blazoning signs that communism was going to catch hell just as after War I when the heady atmosphere of liberalism was becoming just a bit too much to stomach. Americans were afraid to suck every drop of meaning from the words that had given their country birth in the first place.

New liberalism? Look at Max.

Max Reddick was trudging across the street head down.

Max Reddick, a good, competent writer, Harry thought. Ideas to be worked out, a style to be cleaned up and set free. Best reporter the
Democrat
ever had. New liberalism? Look at him. Poor black bastard. All those white boys he knew covering those big stories, that is, the ones who came back in one piece and got their jobs back, were they not liberals? Couldn't they get Max set in a job the way they helped set one another? Uh-uh. No. And Max is still hurting for that girl and a good job. Marriage. By now he may know what kind of marriage it would be. Nothing wrong with the girl, except that she can't do Max no good. All she sees is a house with a white picket fence, a refrigerator and a washing machine. Such a fine-looking broad, too. Jesus! That chick could be so great for Max.

Harry saw Max move out of sight, approaching the house. In a moment he would be ringing the doorbell. Harry was glad Charlotte had a little money. Not a hell of a lot, just enough so they could get by comfortably. And it was getting so that he was commanding larger and larger advances. There had been some talk too about adapting one of his books for the stage. Yeah, it was going all right, so far. But Charlotte. Getting to be a drag, demanding more and more time for other people, places and things. It was as though she wanted to rip him away from the typewriter for good. That was her rival, the machine. But what a rival! It wouldn't scream or fight back. Charlotte hated it all the more. On the spur of the moment, Harry decided to go down and meet Max and pick up the mail. Hastily, he rolled the paper in the typewriter so that only the very top of the page showed. Then he took some blank paper and placed it underneath his unfinished manuscript. With a little skip and a floundering left jab at an unseen enemy, Harry Ames moved to the stairway as the buzzer sounded.

Max Reddick was evil. He wanted to punch out every white face he saw. Evil was beyond anger; it was a constant state, the state of destruction, someone else's. Impatiently he rattled the doorknob. C'mon, Harry, you sonofabitch; let me in from these white folks' streets. He glanced behind him. February. Cold, New York cold where the saline air punched holes in the snow and made it melt faster. Today had been payday for Max. For weeks he had been kept dangling, waiting for the final word to come in on several job applications with newspapers and magazines. He wouldn't have been kept dangling at all had it not been for Kermit Shea.

They had been at Western Reserve at the same time, had met at political meetings often enough to nod to each other, nothing more. Then they had met again while covering the Boatwright case and Max learned that Shea worked for the
Telegram
. They had had coffee and drinks together a few times, again, until Max walked into the
Telegram
office to apply for a job and found Shea in charge of Cityside news. Max knew as he filled out his application that Shea was embarrassed. To hell with him. Shea told him the
Telegram
was full up, but expecting departures momentarily, then steered Max to a number of other editors. The interviews were always the same: colorful newsmen's jabber, changing constantly in order to avoid falling into general use by the public. These were followed by the application-form ritual and, finally (sometimes days later, sometimes at once), the leaning back in the chair, man to man (“You and I are above all this, but the publisher ain't and he's the man who lays out the shekels, right? [The implication being that the Jews were driving the WASPs out of newspaper publishing] but call me next month, right, Max?”) And then the handshakes that said that the time wasn't right, but when it is, Max, boy will we call you!

There wasn't a newspaper downtown that Max had missed, armed with Shea's recommendation. (Shea had stopped talking about jobs at the
Telegram
. Now he only talked about when he was in Italy with the
Stars and Stripes
and how he had come close to doing a piece on the Buffaloes. But today had been payday. It had been Shea, that bitterly cold morning, who had turned his chair over to an old criminal courts reporter for an hour so he could spring for drinks. Drinks, that basic American ritual for saying hello, goodbye, it's good to be home unwinding, you're fired, you don't have it. Like that. And yet Max had come to like Shea, a tall gangling man with prematurely graying hair and a face still filled with childish fat. Over drinks Max could tell that Shea was discovering for the first time in his life what kind of world he lived in, what kind of world he had helped to build simply by not building at all. For Max it was the end of the rope as far as downtown was concerned.

If he still wanted Lillian, it would have to be the Harlem
Democrat
, if it would have him. The routine would be galling and regressive. There was no more time to crap around. But what if the crap really had flooped all over the place? Say all the papers had called the
Democrat
for references. Wow! If the people at the
Democrat
even
thought
he had been trying to get a job downtown they'd give him the shaft. Was it human nature or the human nature of blacks bombarded with minuscule hatreds hourly that would make them happy to turn him away just as Mister Charlie downtown had? It would, in fact, give them more pleasure. No, there was no more time. Lillian Patch was pregnant.

Lillian wanted an abortion because, she said, she did not want to push Max into anything he wasn't ready for. Max, on the other hand, was willing to marry and settle for the
Democrat
and write nights. Or was he? Wasn't he going to ask Harry this morning for the name of a doctor who could do the abortion—if they both finally agreed on it? C'mon, Harry, open the goddamn door! Now, he was even getting pissed off at Kermit Shea. Hell, he was white, why not? Aw, crap.

Then Harry was at the door, letters held in his hand. One of the letters had been opened and fleetingly, as Max brushed past, cursing, he noticed an exultant smile on Harry's face.

“How'd it go?” Harry asked. “You going to be city editor for the
Times?
”

“To hell with you, Harry.”

“Oh-oh,” Harry mocked. “Them white folks been mistreating Max again. Mean to tell me that between Zutkin and Shea, you couldn't get set up? You better see Granville Bryant over in Fag City. He'll get you set up or one of his boys will.” Still walking heavily up the carpeted steps. Harry went on. “I got a tremendous morning's work done. It flowed like piss after twenty bottles of beer. Hit it right on the button.”

But inside the apartment, Harry took a look at Max's face and stopped the fooling. But he gave it one more try. “Uncle Harry told you how it was, Max. Sit down, I'll give you a drink. Read this.”

Max peeled off his coat. It was too much to be faced week after week with the lies, the evasions, even the crudeness, which had been welcome sometimes. He didn't remember when he had felt the first stirrings of undirected anger; now it seemed to have been with him all along and was just finding an avenue of escape. He sat down and read the letter Harry had given him. It said: