A Walker in the City (19 page)

The automatic part of all my reading was history. The past, the past was great: anything American, old, glazed, touched with dusk at the end of the nineteenth century, still smoldering with the fires lit by the industrial revolution, immediately set my mind dancing. The present was mean, the eighteenth century too Anglo-Saxon, too far away. Between them, in the light from the steerage ships waiting to discharge my parents onto the final shore, was the world of dusk, of rust, of iron, of gaslight, where, I thought, I would find my way to that fork in the road where all American lives cross. The past was deep, deep,
full of solitary Americans whose careers, though closed in death, had woven an arc around them which I could see in space and time—"lonely Americans," it was even the title of a book. I remember that the evening I opened Lewis Mumford's
The Brown Decades
I was so astonished to see a photograph of Brooklyn Bridge, I so instantly formed against that brownstone on Macdougal Street such close and loving images of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Peirce, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Eakins, and John August Roebling, that I could never walk across Roebling's bridge, or pass the hotel on University Place named Albert, in Ryder's honor, or stop in front of the garbage cans at Fulton and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn at the place where Whitman had himself printed
Leaves of Grass,
without thinking that I had at last opened the great trunk of forgotten time in New York in which I, too, I thought, would someday find the source of my unrest.

I felt then that I stood outside all that, that I would be alien forever, but that I could at least keep the trunk open by reading. And though I knew somewhere in myself that a Ryder, an Emily Dickinson, an Eakins, a Whitman, even that fierce-browed old German immigrant Roebling, with his flute and his metaphysics and his passionate love of suspension bridges, were alien, too, alien in the deepest way, like my beloved Blake, my Yeshua, my Beethoven, my Newman—nevertheless I still thought of myself then as standing outside America. I read as if books would fill my every gap, legitimize my strange quest for the American past, remedy my every flaw, let me in at last into the great world that was anything just out of Brownsville.

So that when, leaving the library for the best of all walks, to Highland Park, I came out on Bushwick Avenue, with its strange, wide, sun-lit spell, a thankfulness seized me, mixed with envy and bitterness, and I waited against a hydrant for my violence to pass. Why were these people
here,
and we
there?
Why had I always to think of insider and outsider, of their belonging and our not belonging, when books had carried me this far, and when, as I could already see, it was myself that would carry me farther—beyond these petty distinctions I had so long made in loneliness?

 

But Highland Park was different; Highland Park was pure idea. To savor it fully at the end of a walk, I liked to start out fresh from Brownsville. Summer nights that year I was sixteen and she was fifteen, I used to meet her on East New York Avenue, at the corner of the police station. Our route was always up Liberty Avenue, where the old yellow frame houses looked like the remains of a mining town, and the cracks in the pavement opened a fissure that trailed into hills of broken automobile parts littering the junk shops.

The way to the park is north and west, past the Brooklyn line altogether. At the border, the trolley car lines and elevated lines snarl up into one last drab knot; then it is like a fist opening, and the way ahead is clear. We trudged up endless small city hills; except for the rattling of the freight cars in the railroad yards and an occasional watchman's light in the factories, the streets seemed entirely dead. We went past the factories, the freight yards, the hospital, the Long Island railroad station, an abandoned schoolhouse and an old pottery, its green roof cracked and engraved in thousands of small lines, as if everyone passing that way had knifed his name on it. The way up the hills was always strange, no matter how many times we followed it, for every step took us into the parkway off Bushwick Avenue, with its latticed entrances to the German beer gardens.

At Highland Boulevard the last of the factories vanished below the hill, and the park emerged in its summer sweetness. At every corner along the boulevard there were great trees; as we stopped at the top to catch our breaths, the traffic lights turned red and green on the trees and each leaf Hushed separately in the colored light. I used to watch the signals switching red and green on the leaves. The click in the signal box had a humorous sound on the deserted boulevard, and as the light poured on the leaves, green and red, green and red, with a moment's pause between them, I seemed to see some force weary of custom, aroused against the monotony of day and night, playing violently with color in the freedom of the summer evening.

In those days the park lay open along the boulevard. They were always making half-hearted repairs on it that no one ever seemed to finish; we could enter the park anywhere—over the great stone fence above the cemetery; or over planks the workmen had laid between mounds of sand near the basketball court; or up its own hill to the reservoir itself. It was somehow not a real park then, not the usual city park—more like an untended wild growth they had forgotten to trim to the shape of the city. Most people I knew did not care for it; it was too remote, and at night, almost completely dark. It ran past interminable cemeteries where there seemed to be room for all the dead of New York.

But all this made the park more interesting to us. Our favorite way was past the mounds that stood just in from the boulevard. There was something in this I liked—a feeling that we were secretly descending on the park from a great height. I took her hand, and step by step, walking carefully over the planks the workmen had left, we went down into the empty park, past the basketball court, the gardens, the bandstand, until we could hear the old rowboat banging against the wire fence and climb up the hill to the reservoir.

From one side of the reservoir hill we could look across the cemetery to the skyscrapers of Manhattan; from the other, to miles of lampposts along Jamaica Avenue. Below us was a wood, then a military cemetery, slope on slope laid out in endless white crosses. We never tired of walking round the reservoir arm in arm, watching the light playing on the water, and going, as it seemed, from one flank of New York to the other. The city was no longer real; only a view from a distance, interrupted by cemeteries on every side. But on a summer night, when we lay in the grass below, the smell of the earth and the lights from the distant city made a single background to my desire. The lampposts winked steadily from Jamaica Avenue, and the YMCA's enormous sign glowed and died and glowed again. Somewhere in the deadness of the park the water gurgled in the fountains. In the warmth and stillness a yearning dry and sharp as salt rose in me. Far away a whistle hooted; far away girls went round and round the path, laughing. When we went home, taking the road past the cemetery, with the lights of Jamaica Avenue spread out before us, it was hard to think of them as something apart, they were searching out so many new things in me.